Battlegrounds of Memory and Justice

Dynamics of Memories was established as an interdisciplinary research cluster of Lancaster University's Institute for Advanced Studies in 2008. The group's main aim is to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries in the study of the ways collective, cultural and social memories participate in the processes of dealing with a past of war and conflict, and the ways this inflects individual, national, regional and local identities. The group is shaped by a three-tiered structure of nine core members, and a number of associate and external partners. Our group now seeks to network extensively with a view to establish itself as a Research Centre for the Study of Memory in relation with war and conflict in the English North West. This centre would liaise closely with two recently-established centres (London and Warwick), as well as the editors of the new academic journal, Memory Studies, launched in 2008.
The practical ways in which societies remember or reconstruct a past of which conflict, repression or war is central to our group. To study this, we have held a number of workshops (Memory and History, Dynamics of Memories, Memory and Justice, War, Poverty and Memory and The Uses of Memory in the Rise of Right-wing Extremism) and a seminar series. We organized this in 2008-10 with funds awarded from the Higher European Research Authority's Networking Scheme and Lancaster University. The group is currently strengthening its regional links with academics, museums, local NGOs, community officers and local branches of grassroots organisations and political parties.
Furthering our network's activities will enable us to elucidate answers to theories that claim that memory is always individual. We will trace the processes between remembering and reconstructing memories in the social and political arena of various countries, addressing how memories become history when one segment of society wins over the ideological battle for identity. Thus, we will examine the roles played by cultural memories in the construction of a narrative that serves national, local or group identity. Our approaches will trace the transition between remembering and reconstructing memories or memorials in order to imagine or invent a sense of communal purpose, in the sense of those terms given by Benedict Anderson (1992) and Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm (1983).
In order to consolidate our work, and lay the bases for future collaborations, we seek funds to hold three workshops and a series of seminars during 2011-12. For these, we will invite contribution and participation from local and international academics and experts in the field, as well grassroots and other professional organizations working on social and political issues related to memorialisation of conflict, judicial impunity and transitional or restorative justice.
The relevance of our topic is clearly demonstrated by the upsurge in studies on issues related to the uses of collective memory that often surface in the media. While post-conflict communities may be a more obvious presence, this is by no means restricted to those groups, as the long-lasting effects of social traumas are often invoked in a variety of contexts.
Besides the actuality of Holocaust studies, the currency of memory studies can be seen in, for example, the BBC's use of personal memories in the reconstruction of World War II or the invocation of the Vietnam War in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, the access of working-class individuals, women and minorities to mainstream political life has also meant that autobiographies, memoirs and testimonies can no longer be excluded from a society's make up.
Because of the obvious social, historical and political impact of our studies, there will be many opportunities in which to disseminate our work in the various forums where these issues have acquired a sense of urgency, especially, but not only, regarding human rights' violations and transitional justice.

The networking activities planned for the next two years are aimed at intervening and, where practical, influencing civil society and policy makers at local, national and international levels.
The aftermaths of war and conflict are at the core of the work of our group, whose members approach their subject from different disciplines (Law, Politics, Sociology, History and Linguistics). Although our individual work has been widely recognized, we seek to integrate it into a multi-disciplinary, trans-national paradigm in order to study the legacies of conflict from the point of view of collective memory and human rights. This is especially pertinent because developments of International Courts from the 1990s have opened up debates about the possibilities and desirability of universal jurisdiction.
Our project will take interdisciplinarity and transnationalism as tools in order to address the social, political and historical processes that depend on the use or misuse of collective memories in the achievement of justice and a sense of collective wellbeing. The first step in setting out this comparative paradigm is the incorporation of convergent or alternative paradigms into a mode of thought that addresses confabulation, factitious memories and source amnesia in the recovery or invention of a usable past. We seek to trace the possibilities that this past has to forge a fairer future for all, thus taking into account issues of restorative justice and impunity in furthering human rights and communal harmony.
We will undertake a rigorous, comparative scrutiny of the different ways of addressing past injustices following situations of war and conflict. This means that there are many potential beneficiaries from our work in terms of the health, understanding and communal well-being of a society or of groups within it. The wider public and the media are obvious beneficiaries in the medium and short term, whereas politicians, NGOs and community groups can also benefit in the medium, short and long term. An obvious impact of our work will be consultancy regarding these issues, which are plethora in any given year. Our findings can also be used to influence public policies in ways to deal with collective trauma, which is more than the sums of individual traumas.
Museums are potential beneficiaries of our work, as shown by the connections we are forging with them. Our studies are of particular interest to those institutions which focus on memorializing war and conflict, such as the Imperial War Museum, with whose northern branch we have established contact. In particular, two forthcoming events, which will concentrate on genocide (2011 and 2012), will be of interest and we will take part in the preparation and launch of the exhibitions as speakers or consultants. Also, those museums that address the legacies of empire and slavery, such as the Liverpool Museum of Slavery or Lancaster's Maritime Museum, are equally important, and some of our members have already worked with them in the past. Lastly, museums which, like the People's History Museum in Manchester, concentrate on the roles of civilians during conflict are also of importance, and we are also establishing links with them.
Local and community centres, such as Lancaster's Gregson and Storey Centres, arthouses and cinemas, such as Manchester's Cornerhouse or Lancaster's Dukes, often offer talks about films, books or events related to memorialisation, and we will liaise with them to contribute our expertise and collaboration.
While our publications, including the book which will come out of our networking activities, will be of importance in the political and scholarly arenas, a lasting presence as a locally-based group with a strong community visibility will widen this impact to the public arena. The existence of a group with broad expertise on the intersection of memory and huma