Agonistic Perspectives on the Memory of War: An Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces ‘Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe’ (UNREST) which was a Horizon 2020–funded project that ran between 2016 and 2019 and involved researchers from different disciplines, principally, history, literary studies, anthropology and memory studies, coming from British, Spanish, Danish, Polish and German institutions (www.unrest.eu). The researchers involved in the project set out to find agonism in different memory settings across Europe. They analysed cultural memories of war on display in history museums and took a close look at communicative memories of war crafted in response to mass exhumations of victims of war and ethnic cleansing. In addition, UNREST researchers sought to create new sites of agonistic memory. They collaborated with playwrights, actors and museum professionals to develop a theatre play and a history exhibit promulgating agonistic interpretations of warfare. As a result of these efforts, we are now in a position to define in more concrete terms what scholarly, ethical and political potential agonistic memory possesses and what important questions remain to be solved in future research about agonistic memory.