Collective Identity and Social Memory in the Aftermath of Atrocity

• In Event: 172 - Section on Peace, War and Social Conflict Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Peace and Peacebuilding
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Theorizing Peace, War and Social Conflict

Abstract

The Durkheimian tradition in collective solidarity has influenced the ‘recent passion for memory’ (Nora 1996) ; it takes collective memory as essentially social, located in institutions related to laws, normative practices, rules and records used in discourse to not merely explain the past but also transform it through reliable identity processes (Durkheim 2008 [1912]; Misztal 2003) directing the present. This paper will examine the conflagration in Yugoslavia during the 1990s and the role of international law in the recovery of community more than a decade afterward. Practically, what happened in Yugoslavia during the 1990s wars affords insight into the challenge of sustaining diversity and community within a modernizing society that has faced war, genocide and atrocity in the course of social change. Theoretically, it allows us to expand on memory discourse and Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane as traditional societies become modernized.

Author

• Mary J. Gallant, Rowan University