11.1. Rewriting the Past: Denialism, Appropriation, and the Crisis of Democratic Memory Regimes

Women have long been at the forefront of struggles for memory and justice in societies marked by authoritarian violence. From the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina to the Mothers of Srebrenica in Bosnia, Women in Black in Serbia and Israel, and associations of relatives of the disappeared in Chile and Spain, female activists have transformed private grief into collective political resistance. By mobilizing maternal identity and kinship ties, they generated moral authority that challenged silence and helped consolidate democratic memory cultures. Yet today this symbolic capital is under sustained attack. Negationist and revisionist actors not only deny or relativize atrocities—minimizing victim numbers, reframing state terror as “war,” or calling for reconciliation without justice—but also question the legitimacy of women most visibly embodying memory. In Argentina, President Javier Milei and Vice President Victoria Villarruel have branded the Mothers and Grandmothers a “human rights business” and denied the figure of 30,000 disappeared, eroding decades of consensus around truth and justice. Similar patterns emerge elsewhere: in Serbia, Women in Black were stigmatized as “traitor mothers”; in Chile, the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos dismissed as “resentful”; in Spain, victims’ relatives accused of “reopening wounds”; and in Israel, Women in Black condemned as “bad mothers.” This paper asks how gendered strategies of delegitimization function within contemporary memory politics and what this reveals about the resilience of democratic remembrance. Methodologically, it employs a comparative qualitative analysis of political discourse, media framing, and activist responses across these contexts. Findings suggest that negationism undermines democratic memory not only by distorting historical fact but by eroding the moral legitimacy of maternal resistance. Nevertheless, maternal politics persist as a frontline defense of memory, offering enduring resources for democratic resilience.

This paper investigates the instrumentalization of historical policy and collective memory by the Belarusian ruling elites following the 2020 post electoral crisis, examining how historical narratives have been systematically deployed to legitimize political subordination to Russia and reconfigure national identity. The central research question addresses the mechanisms through which the "brotherly nations" myth has been operationalized to reshape Belarusian historiography and collective consciousness. Employing critical discourse analysis, this study examines official state documents, educational curricula (including joint Russian Belarusian textbooks), political rhetoric, state media discourse, and legislative reforms—notably the designation of new national holiday. The analytical framework encompasses three dimensions: the reinterpretation of statehood through Russian Soviet historiographical paradigms, the internalization and amplification of Russian propaganda narratives, and the construction of anti Western, particularly anti Polish, historical discourse. The temporal scope extends from 2020 through the present, with emphasis on transformations following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates a fundamental shift from multi paradigmatic historiography toward monolithic Russian Soviet narratives, achieved through several interconnected mechanisms: historical revisionism emphasizing "triune nation" mythology rooted in Kyivan Rus; systematic educational indoctrination via revised curricula and specialized pedagogical materials; sophisticated digital propaganda disseminated through social media platforms; and cultural production reinforcing state sanctioned historical interpretations. Two critical developments emerge: the revival and recontextualization of Soviet "Great Patriotic War" mythology, and the emergence of anti Polish historical revisionism, manifested in prosecutorial investigations alleging "genocide of the Belarusian people" and attempts to reframe pre 1939 Polish governance as "occupation." These findings reveal how historical policy functions as an instrument of political control, systematically eroding autonomous Belarusian national identity while legitimizing Moscow's hegemony and exacerbating regional tensions. The study underscores the increasingly central role of digital tools in shaping collective memory and historical consciousness in contemporary Belarus.

The central aim of this presentation is to conduct an explication of the deployment of cultural memory concerning the Salvadoran Civil War and the ensuing post-conflict or transitional phase within El Salvador, commencing with the initiation of Nayib Bukele’s administration in 2019. This inquiry is structured around several principal research questions: Under what specific junctures and via what rhetorical modalities has Bukele invoked the recollection of the war's inherent violence, alongside subsequent episodes of violence occurring post-dating the Salvadoran peace accords? What explanatory power do these appeals to cultural memory, emanating from the Bukele regime, afford in the comprehension of his electoral success and political ascendancy within the Salvadoran context? Furthermore, what inferences or conclusions may be derived regarding the trajectory of contemporary geopolitical transformations from these selective appropriations of historical memory? Methodologically, the study will involve an exacting analysis of Nayib Bukele’s official pronouncements and declarations spanning the period from 2019 to 2025. Data collection will focus on materials disseminated via his official social media platforms (X, Facebook, and Instagram), in addition to his annual state-of-the-nation addresses and other formal speeches delivered during official ceremonies, activities, or commemorations pertaining to the Salvadoran Civil War. The final stage of this research will constitute a discursive analysis informed by the theoretical contributions of Foucault (1971), Van Dijk (1997), and Laclau & Mouffe (1985). This analytical orientation is fundamentally predicated on the post-structuralist premise that discourse actively constructs meaning-structures, subjective identities, and hierarchies of power. Consequently, these theoretical lenses are essential for dissecting the mechanisms by which the cultural memory of the Salvadoran conflict and its aftermath is articulated and from which positions of authority such articulations are advanced.

This communication aims to promote a reflection on denialism about the civil-military dictatorship as part of the political propaganda of Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian extreme right. We seek to understand how this denial of our last dictatorship and State Terrorism is related to the political attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Human Rights and social movements in the New Republic (1985-2020). I propose that Bolsonaro's power project includes refounding the republican foundations, being fundamental in this process to change the hegemonic memory regime built from the redemocratization process. In this sense, the hypothesis of this research is that historical denialism is a fundamental and structuring axis in the power Project of the renewed extreme right and occurs in a moment of crisis of the modern historicity regime and emergence of presentism.