Politics of Violence

This entry examines the intersection of memory and the politics of violence. While political violence has existed throughout all of human history, in recent decades there has been a surge in memory of such violence, which itself has become part of political discourse. In this entry, I trace the temporal shift from future-oriented politics to an emphasis on the past and its memory, which has been termed a “politics of regret” (Olick, The politics of regret: on collective memory and historical responsibility. Routledge, New York, 2007) or “retrospective politics” (Bevernage, Hist Theory 54:333–352, 2015). This shift created a normative expectation that collectives confront the past, which prompted the emergence of new discourses and mechanisms intended to help come to terms with political violence, in particular human rights and transitional justice. Together with these more top-down, institutional approaches to confronting the past, new commemorative forms and practices emerged as key modes for addressing violence. However, these discourses and practices aimed at redressing the wrongs of the past often themselves become tangled in the politics of the violence they are addressing. The entry thus concludes with some thoughts on the potential and perils of the recent “activist turn” that has emerged in the practice and study of memory as a way to counter hegemonic memories of the politics of violence.