War memorials have long played a role in marking the transition from war to peace and in post-conflict recovery. Several members of the Visualising Peace team have researched the storytelling done by different war memorials, the perspectives they represent, and the potential they can have for driving conflict as much as mourning, remembering and recovering from it. We have benefited from collaboration with the Civil War Memorials VIP based at the University of St Andrews, and from a wealth of valuable scholarship on ancient and modern memorial practices.
- Student Tao Yazaki has focused her research on civil war and post-conflict transitions in Sri Lanka. In this presentation, she looks at colonial legacies and their impact on peacebuilding, and also at media representations and memorialisation.
- In a second presentation, which explores a series of international (not just Sri Lankan) case studies, Tao considers different trends in public and private memorialisation, the formation (or challenging) of collective memory through monuments, tensions between justice-seeking and stability (or a perpetrator’s peace) in memorial practices, and intergenerational remembering.
- In this analysis of several state-sponsored war memorials in Sri Lanka, Tao critiques their selective representation of history, their marginalisation of minority/oppressed voices, and the work they do to support the Sri Lankan government and its perpetrator’s peace.
- Tao has included an item on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in our Museum of Peace; and student Thomas Frost has written about the Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument.
- We have also featured Antony Seldon’s book The Path of Peace in our Museum, which centres on the ‘peace pilgrimage’ dreamt up by Second Lieutenant Douglas Gillsepie during WWI, as an alternative kind of war memorial; and we have a resource on Peace-Making through Remembrance in our Teaching Resources.
