Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

When and why do states change the stories they tell about dark pasts?  Over the past two decades, as international expectations about truth-telling and accountability have grown, many states have been called on to recognize and apologize for historic wrongs.  While some states have apologized for past crimes, others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts.  Scholarship in the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and memory studies offer partial answers to the question raised above, but none offers a systematic answer to this complex question.  Drawing on an analysis of the post-World War II trajectories of Turkey’s narrative of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the 1937-38 Nanjing Massacre, this paper argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in states’ narratives, but domestic actors largely determine the content of such change.  Combining historical richness and analytical rigor, this paper aims to unpack the complex processes through which international pressures and domestic dynamics shape states’ narratives and the ways in which state actors negotiate between domestic and international demands in producing and maintaining such narratives.