8.21. What Is Remembered, What Is Silenced: Memory Policies, Public Opinion, and Social Cohesion

This research investigates the differential impact of memory policies—encompassing both active memorialisation efforts and prolonged institutional silence—on social cohesion in societies grappling with contentious pasts. Drawing on the "The Afterlives of Silence" project, this study offers a necessary empirical, interpretative, and normative analysis of how state posture shapes public opinion and mnemonic formation following human rights violations. The central problem addressed is the underexplored effect of state silence on the efficacy of subsequent transitional justice and reconciliation measures. The project introduces a taxonomy of institutional silence to categorise state inaction and elaborates the concept of the 'metahistorical shift' to measure how a society’s assessment of the past evolves due to policy interventions. Employing a methodology that combines theory of history and critical discourse analysis, this study conducts a comparative investigation of the 'silent period' (the years prior to official engagement) against later public reckonings. Case studies span Europe, Africa, and Latin America, contrasting the Brazilian case (15 years of institutional silence) with countries that pursued public reckoning, such as South Africa, Spain, and Uruguay. The findings will provide new empirical knowledge on the dynamics between policy and public opinion, leading to improved tools for lawmakers. Ultimately, the project contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how effective memory policies can strengthen democracy, prevent historical repetition, and foster social cohesion and reconciliation.

Public amnesia and the political choice to ‘forget’ aspects of a difficult past define many post-atrocity contexts. The paper explores how distinct forms of war-peace transition – rebel victory versus power-sharing versus non-transition – shape the memory regime and produce different forms of public amnesia in Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya. The paper studies public amnesia by focusing on sites of violence and their encounters with erasure to capture the everyday aspects of securitisation of memory. The paper finds that public amnesia directly impacts conflict transformation – specifically, it shows how amnesia contributes to grievance via non-recognition in Rwanda, and how exposures without meaningful redress in Burundi and the refusal to engage with deeper roots of conflict in Kenya undermine sustainable peacebuilding efforts. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of addressing the regional dimensions of public amnesia and proposes new conceptual tools for peacebuilding scholarship and practice.

Research question. To what extent did implicit memory in the early 1990s prevent—or enhance—the formation of public opinion in Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic? We theorize implicit memory as pre-reflective habits and interpretive schemas sedimented under late socialism (pragmatic withdrawal from politics, routinized skepticism, “small publics”). These mnemonic repertoires survived 1989 and quietly structured the translation of diffuse popular mood into articulated, measurable public opinion. Rather than an “expansion” of a public sphere, we treat the 1990s as the conversion of an authoritarian-era nominal “public” (mass) into an addressable, sampleable public that could be governed, campaigned to, and mobilized. Empirically, we combine: (i) a re-analysis of longitudinal transition surveys (1990–1996) tracing a shift from euphoria to ambivalence and the stabilization of trust plateaus; (ii) press and prime-time TV analysis to reconstruct semantic fields around capitalism, rule of law, market, justice and track their reconstitution through institutional change and political contestation; (iii) a pre-1989 baseline of attempts to capture popular opinion at home (state and party research units, state sociological institutes) and abroad (Radio Free Europe Audience/Opinion Research using refugee/defector interviews, listener studies, content analysis); and (iv) an audit of early polling credibility (organizational capacity, sampling frames, transparency) and the feedback loop by which polls re-entered discourse (headlines, campaign strategy, governmental and business uptake). Implicit memory supplied familiar shortcuts that accelerated opinion formation, yet constrained democratic learning by normalizing distance from politics and fostering a nascent “sondocracy” [pollocracy]—polls indexing mood more than deepening participation. By shifting attention from “public sphere” narratives to the making and measuring of “the public,” we show how memory shaped the categories, semantics, and sampling through which the public’s voice became legible—and consequential—for early-1990s democracy.