Peace and Conflict Cultural Network

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The Peace and Conflict Culture Network will address the complex and contested questions that face post conflict societies, of what should we remember, what should we forget, and, ultimately, why? It will explore the role of publicly visible memory and its potential impact on issues such as reconciliation and healing in the wake of conflict, and how could and should (consciously and unconsciously) memory processes shape the present and future. These questions of memory (and forgetting) are intensely political and have far-reaching consequences and these debates are vital to institutions of cultural memory that engage with the past in order to make sense of the present and build towards a more peaceful future. The network will therefore explore how public institutions (such as museums and other heritage sites that support education/awareness) can deal with the past? What is the role if any of such institutions in transitional justice and making sense of contested pasts as a part of peacebuilding and conflict prevention?The network will seek to facilitate connections with academics and other relevant stakeholders and mobilise arts and social institutions engaged in peace, conflict and cultural discourse in the UK and abroad in selected regions. It is an innovative network that brings together academics who work on post-conflict societies and organisations and museum practitioners in countries that have recently experienced armed conflicts or genocide. It will posit a central research question: what is the role of museums and memory sites that deal with memory and conflict, and how can they more effectively promote tolerance, resilience, inter-group and inter-ethnic cooperation? Within that question, the network will deal with a number of sub-questions, such as: What is a museum's responsibility in the formation and maintenance of cultural memory? Which strategies for public engagement work and which do not? Within these broad themes, the network will focus on several research questions in detail by exploring case studies from relevant practitioners and institutions. Firstly, it will investigate the role of art and artists in a museum/site of memory context in contributing to peacebuilding processes. Secondly, the network will facilitate discussions around the question of how youth can be engaged actively in peacebuilding through engagement with museums/sites of memory.The network will especially foreground the contribution from academics and institutions from post conflict societies in particular from the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and the Great Lakes region, Lebanon and the Middle East and Colombia and Latin America. It will facilitate a series of virtual and physical workshops and seminars and two major conferences on Museums and Memory to be held in Sarajevo in 2022 and 2023.It will support the development of several live projects between museums and other civic society actors including the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial, The Post Conflict Research Centre in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.