millions of people mobilize around memorials as important spaces for expressing personal connections to political issues. They often do so with tremendous passion and force, leading in some cases to explosive controversies and even violence.
sought to promote an intellectual and political dialogue on how memorialization can serve democracy efforts around the globe. In particular it focused on strategies for collaboration among and between state and civil society actors.
At worst, excluding memorials from political analysis and public accountability can undermine peace-building and reconstruction processes, providing zones of “symbolic” politics where both national governments and local constituents may promote divisive or repressive messages in ways they could not in other spheres. At best, leaving them out of democracy building squanders their potential to create lasting popular support for truth- seeking and justice, as well as enduring places where each generation can constructively engage with the legacies of past conflict.
The meeting was designed to celebrate the specific cultural and historical features of different efforts to address the past, not to develop prescriptions or formulas for what a memorial should look like. But it recognized the need for policy-makers to take memorials seriously as social and political forces and create innovative, self-conscious strategies for integrating memorialization into overall democracy building.
Why Memorialization and Democracy? Memorialization and Democracy, the first international conference seeking to generate diverse strategies for integrating memorialization and democracy building, grew out of three imperatives: • Memorialization can play a constructive role in shaping cultures of democracy and therefore needs to be taken seriously in any democracy-building project; • Deliberate local, national, and international strategies are required to ensure that memorials do not undermine other democracy-building efforts but rather complement such initiatives. One of the key actors is government, which can play an important role in helping support initiatives through public policy; • These strategies require participation of a wide variety of actors from different fields and different locations and must be appropriate in wildly diverse political and cultural contexts. Memorialization and Democracy brought together theorists, practitioners, and policy-makers from diverse fields to develop innovative approaches to public memorials. The 130 participants came from more than 20 different nations and represented diverse sectors including ministries of culture and human rights, victims’ groups and museums, architects, artists, and legal advocates. The conference
In this sense the meeting’s most important goal was to reflect on the potential role of public policy in supporting memorialization initiatives. Participants developed the first set of recommendations for specific ways states and civil society in different national contexts can work together to open memory sites as new centers for lasting citizen engagement in protecting human rights. Three organizations committed to addressing these issues from different backgrounds and perspectives initiated the conference: FLACSO–Chile, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, whose Chilean member is the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park Corporation. They developed the conference in collaboration with Chilean government and civil society groups. The Ministry of Public Lands served as the official governmental counterpart for the conference, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Office of the Presidency, and other ministries and governmental institutions participated.
Focus on Chile Chile was a unique and invaluable venue for this international discussion, as it provided concrete examples of many of the dilemmas, challenges, and issues discussed. Over the past decade memorialization projects have proliferated there. They range from preserving and interpreting sites such as the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park to constructing memorials, such as those in Pisagua and Lonquén, that acknowledge the regional and social heterogeneity of repression. At the same time a wide variety of state and civil society groups have incorporated memorialization into their democracy-building and justice
Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action
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