HRMN · Human Rights, Memorialization and Nationalism
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
- EU contribution
- €187,866
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Human Rights, Memorialization and Nationalism
In my Marie Curie project, I applied historical sociological methods and the knowledge from the sociology of ideologies to better understand human rights and its outcomes on the ground. I have focussed on the ways in which memorialisation processes are understood in post-conflict and in-conflict settings and how those processes affect, and are affected by human rights and nationalism. Based on ethnographic evidence from the Western Balkans (Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia) and Israel and Palestine, I present three main conclusions. First, states with a difficult past perceive the external “colonising” of human rights as a threat which, contrary to expectations in literature and policy discourses, gives legitimacy to their nationalist feelings, where these sentiments are viewed as an oppressed, authentic, autochthonic truth that is under attack. This, I show, can partially explain the rise of nationalist sentiments across the globe. Secondly, I show that both micro-solidarity and human rights infrastructures are eminently temporal, and though they often make short-term transformations, they are liable to hijacking by the nation-state, which can easily harvest and transform the micro-solidarity of human rights into nationalist-centred sentiments. Thirdly, I demonstrated how the normative framework of human rights obscures processes of depolitization, decontextualization and dehistorization of particular social agents, showing that the normative framework produces not only new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, but also fuels corruption, and perpetuates hierarchical and often colonial structures that are already in place. As a result, I argue, mandating memory in the name of human rights does not end up in a better appreciation of human rights, but instead is often destabilising, potentially adding fuel to the very same nationalist fires that it is supposed to extinguish.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This research deals with the rise of memorialization standards and policy-oriented attempts to engage transitional societies to develop and adopt specific normative forms of remembrance. This project addresses one particular human rights assumption - that the standardization of memory enforced through memorialization policies is effective and necessary in promoting human rights values. Human rights advocates insist on memorialization as a crucial step in establishing moral responsibility for past atrocities understanding it as an insurance policy against the repetition of crimes. In nationalist ideologies, however, memory and memorialization is used for the sake of defining the “self” and the “other” through boundaries along ethnic lines. The project investigates the ways in which human rights advocates understand, promote and mandate supposedly universal memorialization standards, asking whether in so doing they weaken or instead often actually strengthen nationalism. Within the University College Dublin, School of Sociology, and under supervision of Prof Malešević, a world-known expert in nationalism, the goal of this project is to get 1) new theoretical framework for the critical interdisciplinary study of human rights` memorialization policy; 2) new empirical insights into whether in different national contexts (in the Balkans and the Middle East) the prescribed standards of memory are being promoted, and if so, by whom and to what ends; 3) to develop case and gender-sensitive and cost-effective policy recommendations for future implementation of the EU human rights` memorialization policies. Successful realization of the project will enable Dr David to get a tenure track position at Hebrew University, where she will further use the acquired knowledge to search for innovative solutions to strengthen human rights.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN · DublinCoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union