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Cultural Heritage of Conflict

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The project “Cultural Heritage of Conflict” deals witch post-conflict societies and their confrontation with a difficult heritage of the violence. It will investigate what role difficult cultural heritage of conflicts plays for the construction of peace after intrastate conflict.

It will generate theoretical insights into the function of cultural heritage of conflict, develop a methodological approach that accesses the conflictual and agonistic dynamics of peace processes, and provide detailed ethnographic studies of the relationship between tangible and intangible cultural heritage of conflict and the ways in which commemoration processes are conceived, used, performed and designed in societies emerging from conflicts. Our focus is on the actual sites and artefacts that conflict in itself has produced, which we read in conjunction with the wider issues of how these sites are used and interpreted in the domains of intangible heritage.

The project contributes to the literature on cultural heritage by closing the gap between tangible and intangible, historical and contemporary cultural heritage that prevails in conceptual and empirical analyses. Further, these insights, coupled with an engagement with theories of spatiality and new materialism, build a bridge between cultural studies and peace & conflict research.

Project Period: 2017-2022
Funding: Swedish Research Council
Principal Investigator: Johanna Mannegren Selimovic
Team: Prof. Dr. Susanne Buckley-Zistel (Marburg), Johanna Mannegren Selimovic (Stockholm), Annika Björkdahl (Lund), Stefanie Kappler (Durham)