Movements and Memory in Post-Violence Times: Between Mnemonic Traditions and Generational Change

This paper presents a theoretical framework for analysing how the memory of past armed conflicts influences contemporary social movements. It explores how collective memory, rooted in experiences of violence, shapes current activism, and conversely, how activism contributes to the construction of memory. To achieve this, the paper addresses two key dimensions: the inter-movement and the inter-generational dimensions. The inter-movement dimension considers the relationship between a social group’s proximity to former armed groups and how that proximity influences the group’s memory of the conflict. I apply the radical milieu theory, which highlights the complex networks of support surrounding radical movements, to explore how different degrees of involvement or distancing from armed groups impact the ways in which social movements recall and interpret the conflict. This approach helps elucidate how memories are selectively preserved, contested, or transformed depending on the group’s historical and ideological ties to violent actors. The second dimension, the inter-generational aspect, examines how memory evolves across generations of activists. For post-violence generations, memory is shaped by two factors: the mnemonic communities they belong to and their political socialization in a post-violent era. Mnemonic communities refer to social groups that hold a mnemonic tradition from the past, while generational units are activist cohorts shaped by the specific political contexts in which they came of age. In this context, the end of an armed conflict (and the consequent decrease of social polarisation) represents a transformative event capable of changing the social structure in a durable way that will influence new generations’ experience of social reality during their impressionable years. This combination reveals how younger activists, who did not experience the conflict firsthand, find themselves between their own interpretations of the past and communities’ inherited memories in their present-day activism. By focusing on these two dimensions, this framework sheds light on the dynamic relationship between memory and activism, offering a nuanced approach to understanding how the legacies of armed conflict are negotiated within ongoing social struggles. Moreover, the framework intends to contribute to studying culture in social movements by analysing the tension over a movement’s culture (the movement tradition coming from the past) and new movement generations’ agency within their cultural boundaries.