Politics, representations of memory, silence, and oblivion: CALAS podcast with Stefan Peters
The question of how to deal with a nation’s violent past is a complicated and often debated one. In the latest instalment of the podcast Acentos Latinoamericanos de Calas (Centre for Advanced Latin American Studies), four researchers met to discuss this issue and ask themselves how to narrate, remember, and construct stories in a society where victims and perpetrators make a commitment to coexist in peace.
CAPAZ Academic Director, Prof. Dr. Stefan Peters, took part in this conversation along with several Latin American and German researchers. In this episode, Prof. Peters asked how memory of a particular conflict is built. While this is a necessity for many of the actors involved, Peters considers that these are not processes that emerge in a historical or political vacuum, and that it is worth asking what kind of elite pacts emerge in memory building. That is, how memory-making can also be permeated by social class differences or structural inequalities that directly influence processes of transition to peace.
“We need to think about how social inequalities also affect memory making, both for those who have a voice and those who do not”, said the professor of Peace Studies at Justus Liebig University, Giessen. With this statement, he reminded the audience that we have to think about memory building from a relational perspective, in which forgetting, power, and the elite have a direct impact.
Another important topic mentioned by Prof. Peters is the role of digital media and its influence on memory building, especially among the young. He insisted on the importance of academia raising questions about how to empirically investigate what happens on social networks, and how much impact they have. According to Peters, these questions are very interesting because they invite us to think about how a particular narrative of the conflict is being created, one which is very different from the one that circulates in contemporary textbooks or academic curricula.
Listen to the full podcast here.