Does Memory Make Safe in the Wake of Atrocity? Pacification of Violent Pasts, Memory Labor, and Everyday Security

Abstract

Does commemoration of violence enhance or undermine everyday security? Whilst memorialization has become a staple of peacebuilding processes, the everyday security dimensions of memory remain understudied. Drawing on three case studies of recent transitional justice memory initiatives in Eastern and Central Africa—Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya– and on qualitative fieldwork in all three countries, the paper shows that elites are vested in the pacification of memory—careful management of the perceived threatening aspects of memory—rather than in its emancipatory potential, with profound implications for everyday material and physical security. People’s production and consumption of memorialization in context of securitized memory reproduce forms of insecurity—in material sense of extractive labor when producing witness testimony or research on memory, in the sense of physical threats when probing silences or challenging hegemonic narratives of the past, and in the form of retraumatization during memorialization. These everyday insecurities constrict the emancipatory and peacebuilding potential of postatrocity memory initiatives, as evidenced by very different types of war–peace transition, mass violence, and political regime. The paper contributes to debates on critical security and everyday IR by theorizing the memory-security nexus as a domain of lived experience in conflict-affected contexts.