Memory Regimes: Unpacking Contemporary Nationalist Memory Politics in Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Variously termed nationalist, populist, or illiberal memory politics, can be effectively unpacked through the concept of memory regimes – understood as the political and institutional arrangements through which political actors promote specific views of the past over others, in an attempt to shape political identities and control the memory landscapes. The panel brings a diversity of empirical examples, ranging from mnemonic silences on the case of desertion and draft evasion in the Yugoslav wars, through the social dynamics of co-optation of historians at post-communist National Memory Institutes and enmity palimpsests as an expression of illiberal memory politics in Croatia’s memory regime, to the Ukrainian memory regime's policing of international scholarship on World-War II Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. In this manner, we bring together distinct but complementary reflections on memory regimes with the aim of furthering the systematization of memory politics scholarship in Central, Eastern and South East Europe.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Zoltan Dujisin, Corvinus U (Hungary)

Papers

• The Silence of Dissent: Mnemonic Silences and the Yugoslav Wars - Milica Popovic, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)

• National Memory Institutes: From Post-Communist Transitional Justice to De-Democratization - Zoltan Dujisin, Corvinus U (Hungary)

• Memory Institutes and Diaspora: Policing Memory Regimes across Borders - Per Anders Rudling, Lund U (Sweden)

Discussant

• Zsófia Lóránd, U of Vienna (Austria)