Memory Content As a Trade Currency: An Explanatory Model

Since the 1980s, the human rights vision of memorialization has grown together with the prevalent idea that public and official recognition of crimes is essential to prevent further violence in divided or post-conflict societies. Recently, the UN adopted the “memorialization standards” – promoting Western memorial models as a template for the representation of past tragedies and in so doing requiring states with difficult pasts to adhere to the proscribed standards of memory. The manner in which official memory in (post) conflict states is constructed is no longer solely an internal matter because external factors exert a significant influence on local memory, through the human rights regime and through other means of imposing externally-determined values on local actors.

This paper aims to question the usefulness and the side effects of the human rights agenda which is based on the assumption that the standardization of memory is effective in promoting universalist human rights values in conflict and post-conflict settings. I suggest it is precisely here, in the gap between local and global political forces, that trade in memory contents may take place, with local actors agreeing to adapt their own history in accordance to foreigners’ definitions in exchange for political and economic benefits. Through a comparison of memory content alterations over time, as manifested in the memorialization projects of three post-conflict states (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina), and two in-conflict states (Israel and Palestine), I wish to account for the unexpected outcomes when states face conflicting pressures from domestic and international audiences.