Timothy Williams (Muenchen), Genocide memoryscapes

Memoryscapes are shaped by the politics of memory and in turn they shape political power in post-genocide societies. Understanding memoryscapes as materially and socially constituted spaces in which various collective and individual memories coexist, compete and coalesce to render the past significant in the present, memoryscapes are constituted by a vast array of material sites and objects, embodied practices, narratives and discourses and cultural heritage that interact with each other in creating meaning of the past. This talk explores how the memory of violent pasts are used in post-violence societies to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. In particular, drawing on in-depth fieldwork in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Indonesia, Timothy Williams argues that the core element of memory for power and legitimacy is how individual roles and responsibility are attributed regarding the violent past: who is remembered as a perpetrator, who assigned the role of victim, who is celebrated as a hero?

Timothy Williams is a Junior Professor of Insecurity and Social Order and Chairman of the interdisciplinary research centre RISK at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. Timothy is the author of the books Memory Politics after Mass Violence. Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape (2025, Bristol UP), The Complexity of Evil. Perpetration and Genocide (2021, Rutgers UP), and co-author of Peace and the Politics of Memory (with Johanna Mannergren, Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Stefanie Kappler, 2024, Manchester UP).