This panel explores how social memories and social representations of violence are constructed, contested, and institutionalized across different historical and political contexts. The discussion aims to question how societies remember—or also how they forget—episodes of extreme violence, and how these processes shape collective identities and political imaginaries.
Christian Gudehus analyzes the case of the People’s Republic of China, where the long history of collective and state violence—from land reforms to Tiananmen—has been actively erased through censorship and historical revisionism. His paper distinguishes between systematic state-imposed forgetting and what he calls “ignorant forgetfulness,” a silence within the international academic field that perpetuates this erasure.
Matías Figal examines Bosnia and Herzegovina, where thirty years after the Dayton Accords, three competing official memories—each aligned with a national group—continue to fragment the state. His analysis highlights how memory becomes both an instrument and an obstacle for post-war state-building, transforming symbolic divisions into bureaucratic and institutional realities.
Verena Muckermann focuses on the Syrian diaspora under the Assad dictatorship, interpreting the regime’s violence through a genocidal lens. Her research on exiled Syrians identifies a “mnemonic limbo”—a state of suspended belonging that functions simultaneously as trauma and resistance, preserving collective ties despite enforced fragmentation.
Finally, Jorge Wozniak examines how the memory of the Holodomor famine was transformed into a foundational myth of Ukrainian national identity, linking the remembrance of victimhood with contemporary nation-building and resistance to Russian aggression.
Together, these papers interrogate the intersections between memory, violence, and identity formation, revealing how remembering and forgetting are not passive acts but deeply political processes that shape the present and the possibilities of collective futures.
Jorge Wozniak, Center For Genocide Studies/National University of Tres de Febrero - "The Official Remembrance of the Holodomor in the Formation of Contemporary National Consciousness in Ukraine This presentation will analyse how the memory of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 (the Holodomor) was used by nationalist exile groups and, after independence in 1991, by the country's various governments as one of the main tools for constructing a national identity. In this sense, the officialization of the Holodomor remembrance sought to present the famine as a Soviet project to weaken the Ukrainian nation and, therefore, prevent its growth and possible independence. As a result, the Holodomor became a fundamental milestone in differentiating a persecuted "national we" from any harmful external influence, specifically directed against the two groups that could jeopardize the nation-state that was sought to be consolidated after 1991: communist voters and groups who identified themselves as ethnic Russians. The memory of the Holodomor increasingly took on the character of a sacralised event in official history, justifying the actions of nationalist groups that collaborated with the Nazis, under the argument that any regime could not be worse than the one that sought the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. Since the 2014 uprising and especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, both in official discourse and among various nationalist groups, the redefinition of the past has been systematically used to confront the invaders and reinforce the project of a monolingual and monocultural state, where the memory of the 1932 famine has continued to retain a foundational character.
Matías Figal, CEH UNTREF/FSOC UBA "Politics, Memories, State: Bosnia and Herzegovina Thirty Years After the War"
Thirty years after the Dayton Peace Accords ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country remains deeply shaped by conflicting memories of the conflict. Unlike other former Yugoslav republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s postwar context is marked by a complex institutional architecture created in Dayton, which produced three official and hegemonic memories tied to distinct geographical and ethnic spaces. Each corresponds to one of the country’s three main national groups and offers its own interpretation of the war’s causes, development, and consequences. Promoted by specific political actors and institutions, these narratives are linked to divergent –and often incompatible– political projects concerning Bosnia and Herzegovina’s identity and future. Consequently, the contest over memory not only affects the understanding of the past but also challenges the very legitimacy and coherence of the state.
This paper examines how these competing memories have shaped the institutional trajectory of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. It first outlines the emergence and defining features of these narratives, then analyzes the diverse formats through which they are expressed—commemorations, monuments, laws, and other public instruments—highlighting their mutual interactions or silences. Finally, it explores the bureaucratic implications of the institutionalization of memory, showing how symbolic divisions translate into material inequalities that directly influence and define the ongoing state-building process
Verena Muckermann, Ruhr Universität Bochum/Faculty of Social Science "Genocide, Resistance, and Mnemonic Limbo: Syrian Diaspora Between Fragmentation and Resilience"
This presentation examines the implications of defining and narrating state violence in Syria under the Assad dictatorship as genocidal. Drawing on Feierstein’s concept of genocide (2014, 2023), which emphasizes the destruction of social fabric beyond physical extermination, it argues that this framework allows a deeper understanding of the societal consequences of Assadist violence. Framing the regime’s actions as a partial destruction of the Syrian national group broadens the notion of victimhood to include exiled Syrians, often excluded from conventional narratives of the conflict.
Based on qualitative research with Syrians in Europe (2021–2024), the study reveals diverse ways in which exiled Syrians navigate their experiences of violence. It identifies a continuum of psychosocial responses ranging from individualization — a coping strategy that focuses on personal survival by detaching from a Syrian collective — to a persistent “limbo-state,” marked by unresolved trauma and a suspended sense of existence between time, space, and belonging. This limbo-state results from the regime’s deliberate effort to dismantle social cohesion and reorganize society.
While precarious and painful, this condition can also be read as a form of collective resilience. Despite the regime’s intent to destroy the social fabric, many exiled Syrians remain psychologically connected to a larger collective victimized by the dictatorship. By conceptualizing the limbo-state as a site of mnemonic resistance, this paper contributes to Genocide and Memory Studies. It shows that, rather than indicating disconnection, this mnemonic limbo challenges the regime’s attempt to erase social and historical consciousness, expressing an enduring attachment to a collective identity and a refusal to be silenced.
20260731T110020260731T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires8.14. The Construction of Social Memories and Its Challenges: China, the Balkans, Syria, and UkraineSV104MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
