Traditionally, war commemorations have been about reinforcing nationhood and restoring the political order brutally upset by war. Nevertheless, collective memorialisation is complex and can take on many forms. As Jenny Edkins has pointed out, because of its essentially political character the trauma of war can open up spaces where memory is used not to restore the established order but, on the contrary, to promote change and, in a more subversive move, challenge the political systems that were responsible in producing war and violence. In order to address these issues, scholarly attention has not only been paid to state driven memories of war, but also to how veterans, survivors and subnational groups have (silently or otherwise) contested these forms of memorialisation. This paper will study pacifist forms of remembrance as an instance of emancipatory memorialisation of the violent past, as they use the memory of war to challenge the system of militarized interstate rivalry, achieve reconciliation through mutual recognition of grief and suffering, and avoid future wars. I will focus more closely on the case of Flanders, where the pacifist narrative has always been a salient element in the memorialisation of the Great War. The case of Flanders is interesting, not in the least because Flanders Fields offers a complex landscape of memorialisation, where various strands of commemoration co-exist: the British Commonwealth tradition, the national Belgian strand, and the Flemish tradition of commemoration.
