Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal - Volume 6, Nummer 1, 2026

This paper examines the role of museums in shaping public perceptions of past conflict through visual representation. It explores how victim-perpetrator narratives are constructed and visualised within museum spaces and how such representations contribute to the reconciliation process. This study focuses on the visual representation of the Jeju 4.3 Incident in the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park in South Korea. It applies thematic analysis to examine textual descriptions, along with formal and iconographic analysis to analyse images and artworks, exploring the narratives constructed within the museum space. Particular attention is paid to the stakeholders of the presented voices and the format of visual communication in delivering bottom-up narratives. The paper argues that museum representations in the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park contribute to the reconciliation process by providing a space to negotiate different interpretations of the conflicting past. This is achieved by giving victims a platform to share their perspectives, exposing state violence within a state-led museum, and promoting the recognition and commemoration of victims. By publicly engaging with difficult and dissonant heritage, the exhibition reintroduces the conflict into collective memory, encouraging changes in public perception and shaping shared understanding of the past.

Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s 2022 apology for the “extreme violence” of Dutch armed forces during Indonesia’s war of independence (1945–9) was not only extended to the “people of Indonesia”. It was also addressed to Dutch veterans and, euphemistically, to the diverse diaspora community from the former Netherlands East Indies in the Netherlands today. Between the lines of Rutte’s apology lurked a problem that has haunted Dutch politics ever since. Exactly which historical actors were responsible for the “extreme violence on the Dutch side?” This article traces how some veterans’ and Indies-diaspora lobbyists have formed what we call “allied entitlement groups”. We focus on how these groups have mobilised politically to object to the spectre that Rutte’s apology raised of their implication (in the Rothbergian sense) in an unjust war, despite his best efforts to appease them. We argue that concepts of trauma and an interdependent politics of victimhood are central to these political mobilisations, in extra-parliamentary politics as well as by Dutch politicians. Our article critiques the historical and conceptual evasions in these political mobilisations, to mount instead an argument for truth-telling and acknowledging complex forms of implication.

Inspired by the Nazi rally grounds in Nurnberg, the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands (NSB) purchased a plot of land near the village of Lunteren where they created an open-air theatre that could accommodate thousands of people. On one side of the terrain a long curved wall was constructed, which is known today as ‘Mussert’s wall’ after NSB-leader Anton Mussert who used it as a podium to deliver his speeches. Since the early 2000s, discussion arose about the site’s future. On the one hand, some local political parties and heritage organisations wanted to restore and preserve it. On the other hand, the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) tried to prevent this, fearing that Mussert’s wall would become a place of pilgrimage for right-wing extremists. In 2018, the national heritage agency of the Netherlands (RCE) decided to enlist the building as a national monument. This started a new discussion about how the site should be presented to visitors. This paper analyses the interplay between stakeholders involved in discussions about Mussert’s wall, including local communities, governments, heritage professionals, and other interest groups, as well as the strategies they considered for this site, ranging from demolition to preservation and adaptive reuse.

In the early 2020s, two seemingly unrelated political developments came to a head in the Netherlands. First, in January 2020, then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the center-right VVD party issued an official apology on behalf of the Dutch government for its complicity in the deaths of more than 100,000 Dutch Jews in the Holocaust. Second, in the November 2023 national elections, Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim, pro-Israel PVV party won the highest percentage of votes, leading to the formation of a far-right cabinet under Prime Minister Dick Schoof in July 2024. In this article, we argue that this double consolidation of the historical legacy of the Holocaust and of racist, right-wing politics has put Dutch Jews in a dangerous bind. On the one hand, the memory of the Holocaust and the contemporary safety of Dutch Jews have been elevated as a paramount concern in Dutch institutional, legal, and political life. On the other hand, Dutch Jews have been positioned as the perennial would-be victims of violent antisemitism—virtually always, it is falsely imagined, at the hands of Dutch Muslims. The historical persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust is now used to underwrite a “proprietary” form of Jewish victimhood in the present: non-Jewish white Dutch people position themselves as the saviors of Jews, and thereby claim ownership over their past, their collective fate, and the political means to secure their safety.

This article examines the politics of victimhood in the Srebrenica Memorial Centre’s permanent exhibition, The failure of the International Community, a joint venture with the Dutch organisations PAX and Memorial Centre Camp Westerbork. Departing from the exhibition’s curation process and its sociopolitical dimensions, this article questions how the exhibition’s textual and visual narratives are shaped by social and political discourses of victimhood, perpetratorship and implication. This article demonstrates how the exhibition draws on dominant narrative templates and tropes derived from the ‘memory imperative.’ This template shapes representations of Bosniak victimhood along gendered binaries, while keeping perpetratorship at a distance through discursive and visual means. The exhibition’s focus on international, and specifically Dutch, actors constructs a narrative of progress and redemption focused on Dutch atonement. By highlighting the memory imperative’s narrative shaping of the exhibition, this article contributes to discussions on power imbalances in transnational memory work, demonstrating how the use of global memorial forms may eclipse local complexities of violence and survivor agency in favour of international atonement.

This article examines how the so-called Battle of Košare, fought during the Kosovo War (1998–1999) and primarily remembered by veterans and families, has become a focal point of Serbia’s official commemoration practices. It analyses the 20th anniversary of the battle as a theatrical event that interweaves victimhood and heroism through documentary theatre, music, and film. Drawing on memory studies, media, and performance analysis, the article demonstrates how the commemoration reinforces Serbia’s victimhood narrative by mobilising emotions as cultural practices and employing theatrical forms of communication that shape and transmit these emotions. It further highlights how the cultural heritage of the Kosovo myth is reactivated and (ab)used for political purposes, showing how war memories and moral grief are strategically constructed to sustain a militarised, state-sponsored memory culture.

The memorial complex of Savur-Mohyla was constructed in 1963 to honour the Soviet soldiers who fell during the “Great Patriotic War.” In 2014, the hill became a contested site of memory between Ukraine and the selfproclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR). Since August of that year, pro-Russian authorities have controlled the site, casting the Ukrainian army as the “ultimate perpetrator” and portraying the “Russian people of Donbas” as the “absolute victims” resisting Kyiv’s so-called “fascist invasion.” This paper argues that the ontological categories of “absolute victim” and “ultimate perpetrator” were neither randomly constructed nor fabricated ex novo. Instead, the occupying authorities reconstructed the Savur-Mohyla memorial to draw a direct parallel between the events of 2014 and those of 1943, when the Red Army liberated Donbas from Nazi Germany. This research qualitatively analyses a corpus of 271 articles and speeches on Savur-Mohyla produced by DPR authorities between 2014 and 2022. The objective is to demonstrate how pro-Russian authorities in occupied Donetsk used the memory of the Great Patriotic War as the means for shaping the notions of “absolute victims” and “ultimate perpetrators.”

The cosmopolitan memory culture or the moral remembrance paradigm, which typically addresses memories of human rights atrocities and often focuses on the binary relationship between victims and perpetrators. However, recent scholarly developments, including Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject, have complicated this dichotomy. Drawing on ethnographic research from 15 museums focused on Soviet terror across five Russian regions, I introduce an additional layer to this framework: the perpetrator-hero continuum or the malevolent-benevolent character of perpetrators’ agency. While in traditional cosmopolitan memory culture, such a concept might seem unimaginable, in the context of an undemocratic society like Russia, the figure of the perpetrator can be reinterpreted in multiple ways, which also puts into question the dominant moral remembrance paradigm in general. This reinterpretation often involves heroization, driven not only by state pressure but also local agendas—such as appealing to pro-Stalinist audiences or fostering regional solidarity, even around former camp authorities.

This article revisits Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory through the lens of the 2023 Gaza war as represented on Instagram. Hirsch’s notion of the “generation after”—those who inherit and creatively reconstruct the traumatic memories of others—is reexamined within an algorithmically mediated environment where witnessing occurs in real time. Drawing on recent studies and articles such as Images of the Israel–Gaza War on Instagram (Elmasry, 2024), The Gaza War Coverage: The Role of Social Media vs. Mainstream Media (Khamis & Dogbatse, 2024), and The War in Gaza Is Also Unfolding on Instagram (Al-Hlou & Nikolov, 2023), this text explores how digital platforms have transformed the ways memory is transmitted—speeding its circulation, deepening its emotional reach, and embedding it in patterns of algorithmic repetition.

Through a close reading of selected Instagram posts and Stories—including viral collaborations, protest graffiti, and symbolic imagery—this study identifies new forms of affiliative postmemory: practices through which users without familial or geographical ties to Gaza engage in acts of remembrance, solidarity, and testimony. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that digital witnessing on Instagram blurs the boundaries between personal and collective trauma. Ordinary users—teachers, cooks, artists—repost and comment on Gaza not only as acts of political solidarity but also as affective responses to their own unspoken memories or postmemories of displacement and loss. In this way, Instagram becomes a “space of affective permission,” where the trauma of others authorizes new articulations of self. The article concludes that, in the digital age, postmemory unfolds not only through familial transmission but also through networked and participatory forms of remembrance that entangle the present with the past.

This research explores how archaeology has been weaponized in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict, focusing on Tell Sebastia as a primary case study. The site’s rich, multilayered history holds material remains from numerous ancient civilizations, showcasing the extensive human occupation of the area. Tell Sebastia, which includes land owned by several different Palestinian families, has changed dramatically over the past few decades, transforming from a prominent archaeological site within the Palestinian territories into a contested and politically charged site. Israeli authorities and settler groups have increasingly sought to reshape the site’s historical narrative to emphasize Jewish biblical heritage, using strategies such as carrying out new excavations, appropriation, confiscation, establishing a national biblical park, and restricting Palestinian access. These actions spotlight the connection between heritage resources, power, and structural violence, set within the larger framework of settler colonialism and military occupation. To analyze the social and cultural impacts of Israel’s expanding control over the site and the surrounding area, the author conducted in-depth interviews with ten residents of Sebastia village.