Past and Power: Public Policies on Memory. Debates, from Global to Local

by Jordi Guixé

Author	: Jordi Guixé
Publisher	: Edicions Universitat Barcelona
Total Pages	: 489
Release	: 2016-05-26
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 8447539938

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The public authorities have not successfully resolved the management of the traumatic memory of the wars, dictatorships and massacres to which the European project was always intended to be a counterpoint. The conflict of memories and the public discourses about the past are latent on ideological, political and cultural levels. However, if in the past the conflict concerning memories tended to develop inside the borders of countries, it has now leapt into the European arena. This has also led to the confrontation and questioning of the great narratives established in the common memory, especially with countries of the East joining the European Union. Each community, group or nation maintains common memories that do not always fit in or converge with a general overall account. The origins of the UB Solidarity Foundation’s European Observatory on Memories lie in these debates, and through this book — which includes the contributions of specialists in multiple disciplines and the speeches that were given at the first international symposium, “Memory and Power: A Transnational Perspective” — it hopes to present some of the key challenges that this conflict of memories has in store for us in the present and in the future.

Youth and Memory in Europe

by Félix Krawatzek

Author	: Félix Krawatzek
Publisher	: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages	: 405
Release	: 2022-06-06
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 3110733501

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This volume contends that young individuals across Europe relate to their country’s history in complex and often ambivalent ways. It pays attention to how both formal education and broader culture communicate ideas about the past, and how young people respond to these ideas. The studies collected in this volume show that such ideas about the past are central to the formation of the group identities of nations, social movements, or religious groups. Young people express received historical narratives in new, potentially subversive, ways. As young people tend to be more mobile and ready to interrogate their own roots than later generations, they selectively privilege certain aspects of their identities and their identification with their family or nation while neglecting others. This collection aims to correct the popular misperception that young people are indifferent towards history and prove instead that historical narratives are constitutive to their individual identities and their sense of belonging to something broader than themselves.

Peripheral Europe

by Ksenija Vidmar Horvat

Author	: Ksenija Vidmar Horvat
Publisher	: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages	: 216
Release	: 2020-09-29
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1527560120

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This book looks at the financial (2007-2008) and the refugee (2015-present) crises and post-crisis development in the EU. The key argument here is that the (mis)management of these crises has been in part conditioned by the specific course of the Europeanisation which occurred during the integration of the post-socialist East. The enlargement processes ran on the premises of a shared European identity, in effect turning the social contract of the new Europe into a cultural contract. This has resulted in betraying the commitment to core values of democratic development, both East and West. The book specifically studies the impact of the “cultural turn” through the discourse of the transition in the Balkan periphery of the ex-Yugoslavian region. Based on rich theoretical and regionally specific empirical research, it will be of interest to scholars in the fields of EU integration, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, studies of post-socialism, and border studies.

Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America

by Karen Silva-Torres

Author	: Karen Silva-Torres
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 297
Release	: 2021-09-09
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1000440222

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Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America provides fourteen contributions to understand, from a multidisciplinary perspective, processes of socio-political reconfigurations in the region from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. The Left Turn was the regional shift to left-of-center governments and social movements that sought to replace the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. This volume aims to answer the overarching research question: how do state and societal (national and transnational) actors trigger and shape processes of political and socio-economic transitions in Latin America from the rise to the decline of the Left Turn. The book presents case studies in which transitions are moments of change and uncertainty, which one cannot predict their definitive outcomes. The various case studies presented in the book place actors and processes in specific historical and socio-political contexts, which are influenced directly or indirectly by the historical trajectory of Latin America’s Left Turn. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of Social and Political History, Latin American History, and those interested in the social and political developments in Latin America more broadly.

Russia Abroad

by Anna Ohanyan

Author	: Anna Ohanyan
Publisher	: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages	: 229
Release	: 2018-10-01
Genre	: Political Science
ISBN	: 162616620X

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While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak, dysfunctional, or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Further, deliberate “un-regioning,” applied by actors external as well as internal to a region, has also gone unnoticed despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries. This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls “fractured regions” and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, consolidate dysfunctional ties within the region, and foster weak states. Russia Abroad specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. It argues that the level of regional maturity in Russia’s vast vicinities is an important determinant of Russian foreign policy in the emergent multipolar world order. Many of these fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of protracted conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.

Transitional Justice in Italy and the Crimes of Fascism and Nazism

by Paolo Caroli

Author	: Paolo Caroli
Publisher	: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages	: 336
Release	: 2022-06-10
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1000593339

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This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the Italian experience of transitional justice examining how the crimes of Fascism and World War II have been dealt with from a comparative perspective. Applying an interdisciplinary and comparative methodology, the book offers a detailed reconstruction of the prosecution of the crimes of Fascism and the Italian Social Republic as well as crimes committed by Nazi soldiers against Italian civilians and those of the Italian army against foreign populations. It also explores the legal qualification and prosecution of the actions of the Resistance. Particular focus is given to the Togliatti Amnesty, the major turning point, through comparisons to the wider European post-WWII transitional scenario and other relevant transitional amnesties, allowing consideration of the intense debate on the legitimacy of amnesties under international law. The book evaluates the Italian experience and provides an ideal framework to assess the complexity of the interdependencies between time, historical memory and the use of criminal law. In a historical moment marked by the resurgence of racism, neo-fascism, falsifications of the past, as well as the desire to amend the faults of the past, the Italian unfinished experience of dealing with the Fascist era can help move the discussion forward. The book will be essential reading for students, researchers and academics in International Criminal Law, Transitional Justice, History, Memory Studies and Political Science.

Memory Laws, Memory Wars

by Nikolay Koposov

Author	: Nikolay Koposov
Publisher	: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages	: 339
Release	: 2018
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1108419720

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A major contribution to our understanding of present-day historical consciousness through a study of memory laws across Europe.

Public Forgetting

by Bradford Vivian

Author	: Bradford Vivian
Publisher	: Penn State Press
Total Pages	: 224
Release	: 2015-10-13
Genre	: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN	: 0271075007

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Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how, contrary to conventional wisdom, communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.

Memory Crash

by Georgiy Kasianov

Author	: Georgiy Kasianov
Publisher	: Central European University Press
Total Pages	: 424
Release	: 2022-01-11
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 9633863813

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This account of historical politics in Ukraine, framed in a broader European context, shows how social, political, and cultural groups have used and misused the past from the final years of the Soviet Union to 2020. Georgiy Kasianov details practices relating to history and memory by a variety of actors, including state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political parties, historians, and local governments. He identifies the main political purposes of these practices in the construction of nation and identity, struggles for power, warfare, and international relations. Kasianov considers the Ukrainian case in the context of a global increase in the politics of history and memory, with particular emphasis on a distinctive East-European variety. He pays special attention to the use and abuse of history in relations between Ukraine, Russia, and Poland.