Memorialization & Prijedor
On October 8 an international coalition of NGOs and leading activists on the right to truth and memorialization submitted a letter to the mayor of Prijedor, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, demanding steps...
View Article“Basta Ya!”: On the Colombian Center for Historical Memory Report
Translated by Roxanne Krystalli. Spanish version available here. Steps towards the construction of peace in Colombia? The account of armed conflict that has affected Colombia for more than 50 years...
View ArticleInforme ¡Basta Ya!: ¿pasos hacia la construcción de la paz en Colombia?
English version available here. El impacto del conflicto armado que vive Colombia desde hace más de 50 años, aun tiene capítulos de los cuales las y los colombianos y el mundo no conocemos. Sin...
View ArticleRights on Display: Museums and Human Rights Claims
Below is an excerpt from my chapter in the newly published volume The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents, ed. by Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus. On April 22, 1993, President Bill...
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Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile
“Are you looking for the museo?” Having taken the wrong metro exit, I surely looked like the standard lost gringa standing on a corner in the old neighborhood of Barrio Brasil on Santiago’s west side....
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The Plaza de Mayo in Fall
This past May, returning to the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires after several years, I see that few things have changed. The “madres” and “abuelas”—mothers and grandmothers of those disappeared...
View ArticleAU Human Rights Memorial Project Consultation Report
Our partners at Justice Africa have recently published a report of the In-Country Consultations 2013-2014. Below is the executive summary and foreword, by Chair of the Interim Board of the AUHRM,...
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Naming the Ones We Lost – South Sudan Conflict
World Peace Foundation would like to express its support for the project, Naming the Ones We Lost–South Sudan Conflict. The power of memorializing acts of mass violence does not reside in the creation...
View ArticleRemembering the Ones We Lost: South Sudan
Today is the official launch date for a website that serves both to document and display the results of efforts to name the ones who have been killed in South Sudan’s conflicts since 1955. WPF is proud...
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South Sudan: Spiritual cataclysm
This cartoon is part of the 8-part cartoon series by Alex de Waal and Victor Ndula depicting South Sudan’s civil war. The whole series is available here
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On memory, coffee and an imperfect circle
On July 11, 2016, the twenty-first anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the installation, “Što Te Nema?” (why aren’t you here?) by Aida Šehović, was hosted in Boston by the...
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On Visiting the September 11 Memorial and Museum
My research over the past year has returned to a topic I once spent a great deal of time thinking about: memorial museums. And so I took advantage of a recent trip to New York City to tour, for the...
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How a statue unveiled the President, part 1
The swamps around Washington, DC were drained a long time ago to make space for the nation’s monuments. In the 1800s, the capital landscape underwent alterations that culminate in today’s National...
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How a statue unveiled the President, part 2
Part One of this essay can be found here. Monuments to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or other Confederate icons tell a different story from that of the American dream of unending expansion of equality...
View ArticleVideo: How a statue unveiled the President
The below short video [3.5 minutes] is based on Bridget Conley’s two part essay, How a statue unveiled the President (part one, part two).
View ArticleThe fiction of collective and personal memory
Several of the key transitional justice mechanisms that were formed into an international template for peacebuilding in the decades following the end of the Cold War had truth-telling at their core:...
View ArticleWe must never forget to remember
The Irish Times published a new piece by Alex de Waal, “We must never forget to remember.” The piece is published as de Waal is set to deliver two talks in Ireland: in Dublin on May 9th (with Trocaire...
View ArticleCommemorating Starvation in the 21st Century, part 1
This is part 1 of our blog series on Alex de Waal’s “Commemorating Starvation in the 21st Century: Address given at Quinnipiac University on October 11, 2018.” The full essay is also available as a...
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Commemorating Starvation in the 21st Century, part 2
This is part 2 of our blog series on Alex de Waal’s “Commemorating Starvation in the 21st Century: Address given at Quinnipiac University on October 11, 2018.”The full essay is also available as a pdf....
View ArticleCommemorating Starvation in the 21st Century, part 3
This is part 3 of our blog series on Alex de Waal’s “Commemorating Starvation in the 21st Century: Address given at Quinnipiac University on October 11, 2018.”The full essay is also available as a pdf....
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New book chapter: Memorial Museums at the Intersection of Politics,...
Bridget Conley has a chapter, “Memorial Museums at the Intersection of Politics, Exhibition and Trauma: A study of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum,” in the newly published, Museum Activism...
View ArticleMonuments to Famine
Alex de Waal’s essay, “Famine Memorials,” is now available through subscription at the London Review of Books, or in print on March 7, 2019. Below is an excerpt: Since 1995, more than a hundred...
View ArticleIntroducing ‘Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial...
My book Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019) has just been published and I am launching a three part blog series introducing the main themes of the...
View ArticleMemory from the Margins
This is the second of a three-part blog series introducing my new book Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019). Here I provide an extract from the book...
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The Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum on Ethiopia’s memorial landscape
This is the third of a three part series introducing my new book Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019). Previously I discussed some of the theoretical...
View ArticleArchiving Syria’s Creative Memory — an interview with Sana Yazigi
“To keep the narratives and to save our history from being told by only one side, this work is very essential…” – Sana Yazigi Last week I had the chance to talk with Sana Yazigi about her work as...
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A-parting
Diane O’Donoghue is Director of the Program for Public Humanities & Senior Fellow for the Humanities, at Tisch College (Tufts University). She and WPF’s Bridget Conley are collaborating on a...
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Slippage—how will the dead matter in Ethiopia?
Ethiopia’s history includes too many dead from political violence. There are long histories, but even if we start only from the overthrow of the imperial regime in 1974, the lines are traumatic,...
View ArticleWhy the African Union Needs a Human Rights Memorial
The only way to truly honour the memory of those who perished in Rwanda is to ensure such events can never occur again. —Ban Ki-Moon Eighteen years ago, in what came to be known as the 100-day Rwanda...
View ArticleMemory and the Social Meanings of Famine
The social meaning of famine is to be found in memory. A just-published special issue of Third World Quarterly on famine and memory, includes contributions on Bengal (India), Biafra (Nigeria), Brazil,...
View ArticleOn the Closure of the Walpole Prison
Around the world, societies struggle over what to do with abandoned structures where violence and injustices once took place. Prisons often loom large within these memory-struggles. In some locations,...
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