Watch here another Different Memories, Shared Futures: Towards Inclusive Memorialisation webinar. The conversation examines how trauma shapes the stories societies tell about the past, identity and intergroup relations. Host of the discussion is project lead Refik Hodzic, with Frauke de Weijer and Dr Alison Castel.
Across societies emerging from conflict, memory is often understood as a duty owed to the past. It preserves the names of those who were killed, documents atrocities, honours survivors and warns future generations of the consequences of hatred and violence. Museums, memorials and commemorative ceremonies all serve an essential purpose: ensuring that suffering is neither denied nor forgotten. For decades, this understanding has shaped memorialisation around the world, especially in societies recovering from genocide, war and mass atrocities. Its moral compass has been clear and compelling: remember, so that it never happens again.
Yet, as conflicts continue to cast long shadows over the present, another question has begun to emerge. If remembrance is focused primarily on preserving trauma, what kind of future does it allow societies to imagine? Can memory do more than warn against repeating the past? Can it also help people imagine different ways of living together?
These questions formed the heart of one of the most thought-provoking conversations in the British Council webinar series Different Memories, Shared Futures: Towards Inclusive Memorialisation in the Western Balkans. In dialogue with Refik Hodžić, Professor Ann Rigney, one of the world's leading scholars of memory studies and author of Remembering Hope, offered a quietly transformative way of thinking about remembrance. Rather than treating memory as a repository of loss, she invited participants to consider memory as a creative force capable of shaping society's capacity to imagine and build a different future.
Rigney began by clarifying an idea that sits at the centre of her work: hope is not optimism. In public discourse the two are often used interchangeably, but for her they describe fundamentally different attitudes towards history and human agency.
"Hope is not optimism... It is against inevitability, against the sense that the course of history is laid out, and basically there's nothing we can do. Hope is a sense that there is something we can do. There is a space of possibility."
This distinction is more than philosophical. It can change how we understand memorialisation itself. Optimism waits for circumstances to improve; hope creates a disposition to act despite uncertainty and despite the knowledge that previous attempts may have failed. It is rooted not in confidence about the future, but in the refusal to accept that the future has already been written.
For societies living with the aftermath of mass violence, where history often feels overwhelming and inherited trauma shapes political life across generations, this understanding opens an entirely different way of approaching memory.
The conversation quickly moved beyond hope itself to an even more fundamental question: what exactly is memory?
Much contemporary memorialisation is built around the language of preservation. We speak of preserving memory as though memory were an object—a monument, an archive or an historic building—that simply needs to be protected from decay. Rigney challenged that assumption at its core.
"Memory is not a thing that can be preserved... Memory is a relationship between the past and the present, and that relationship is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated as the present changes."
This deceptively simple observation carries profound implications. If memory is not an object but a relationship, then memorialisation cannot simply be about safeguarding inherited narratives. It becomes an active social practice through which individuals and communities continually reinterpret the past in light of changing present realities and future aspirations.
It is for this reason that Rigney prefers the expression memory work rather than memory itself. Remembering is not passive storage but something societies actively work on. Stories are retold, symbols acquire new meanings, commemorations evolve, and new generations ask different questions of the same events. Memory is therefore never complete; it remains a living conversation between past, present and future.
As Rigney explained, memory studies itself has increasingly moved in this direction over the past two decades. Rather than thinking only about how the present relates to the past, scholars have begun to understand memory as connecting "past, present and future in a constantly shifting relationship."
That shift becomes particularly significant when considering one of the defining paradigms of post-war remembrance.
For generations, the moral language of memorialisation has been organised around the imperative of Never Again. Emerging from the horrors of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust and later genocides, this framework has rightly insisted on confronting atrocity and acknowledging victims. Its influence has shaped museums, memorials, education and transitional justice across the world.
Rigney does not question its historical importance. Rather, she asks what happens when such a powerful moral injunction becomes fixed, unquestioned and disconnected from changing realities.
"There is always a danger," she observed during the discussion, "that memory becomes monumental." Once memory is frozen into an unchanging form, societies begin treating it as something already settled rather than something requiring continual engagement.
The consequences extend beyond how societies remember the past. They also affect how they imagine the future.
"The future we begin to imagine is a non-repetition of the past... But it is still a negative framing of the future. It's not exactly mobilizing. It's not something you will get out of bed for in the morning."
This insight speaks directly to many post-conflict societies, including those across the Western Balkans, where memorialisation remains the most active element of transitional justice long after criminal prosecutions and institutional reforms have slowed. Public memory has understandably concentrated on acknowledging suffering and resisting denial. Yet when remembrance becomes defined exclusively through trauma, the future risks becoming equally constrained. Societies learn what they must never become again, but struggle to imagine positively what they might yet become.
Throughout the conversation, Hodžić returned repeatedly to this dilemma through the experience of practitioners working in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere in the region. How can memorialisation honour victims without reducing entire communities to permanent identities of victimhood?
Rigney's response was among the most compelling moments of the discussion because it did not seek to diminish suffering. Instead, she proposed expanding the stories through which suffering is remembered.
"Victims don't necessarily have to be only seen as victims. They can be connected to different evocations which are linked to their being as human beings."
The distinction is subtle but transformative. People whose lives were destroyed by violence should never be remembered only through the violence inflicted upon them. They were also parents, children, neighbours, artists, workers, friends and citizens. They had ambitions, political convictions, humour, passions and dreams. Reducing them solely to the circumstances of their death risks diminishing the very humanity that memorialisation seeks to restore.
Rigney illustrated this through examples of cultural works that invite audiences to remember victims not simply as casualties but as people who once lived fully. Such approaches do not weaken remembrance. On the contrary, they deepen it by restoring complexity and individuality where violence sought precisely to erase both. They also open possibilities for empathy that transcend ethnic or political divisions because they begin not with competing identities but with a shared recognition of human life itself.
This shift also points towards another, equally important question. If societies have long spoken about the inheritance of trauma, is it also possible to think about the inheritance of agency? Can memory transmit not only suffering across generations, but also courage, solidarity and the capacity to act?
It is precisely here that the title of Rigney's book, Remembering Hope, acquires its deeper meaning.
Hope, she argues, can itself become culturally transmissible and not because history guarantees success, but because stories can carry forward the aspirations, commitments and moral imagination of those who came before us.
Stories do not transmit only information but also emotional dispositions. Through literature, theatre, music, film and other forms of cultural memory work, societies inherit ways of feeling about the world as much as they inherit historical knowledge. They learn not only what happened, but what previous generations believed was worth striving for.
Rigney described this as creating the conditions for "the contagion of hope", the possibility that hope itself can be passed from one generation to another. Crucially, this does not depend on historical success. Many struggles for justice, equality or peace ended in defeat. Many people whose courage we now celebrate never lived to see the societies they hoped to create. Yet their aspirations remain meaningful precisely because memory can reconnect later generations not only with what happened, but with what those earlier generations imagined might still become possible.
As Rigney explained, "by telling stories in a different way, we can reconnect with the hopes and aspirations of earlier generations and do so in a form which carries positive affect." In other words, memory need not transmit only trauma. It can also transmit resilience, civic commitment and the belief that history always contains unrealised possibilities.
The conversation naturally turned to the role of culture and the arts in making such forms of remembrance possible. Drawing on experiences from the Different Memories, Shared Futures project, Hodžić described one particularly moving example from his hometown of Prijedor, where a theatre performance was staged inside the buildings of the former Keraterm detention camp. For many survivors in the audience, it was the first time they had been able to enter the site since the war. The performance transformed a place long associated with silence and exclusion into a temporary space of collective remembrance, where the names of detainees who had been tortured and killed were spoken aloud into the night.
Experiences like this prompted an important question. Are practitioners sufficiently recognising the transformative potential of artistic interventions in memorialisation?
Rigney's answer was immediate, though characteristically nuanced. Rather than speaking simply about art, she preferred to speak about creativity and imagination.
"The real crux of the matter," she observed, "is how do you go from the idea of memory as an inheritance to a space where you can reconfigure your relationship to the past, present and future?"
That distinction is significant. Art matters not because it decorates memorialisation, but because it refuses closure. Unlike monuments, artistic works remain open to reinterpretation. They invite audiences into dialogue rather than presenting finished conclusions. Theatre, literature, film and storytelling do not simply preserve memory; they continually reshape the emotional and imaginative relationship between past and present.
Rigney was equally careful not to instrumentalise artists. Creativity, she reminded the audience, cannot be commanded. The responsibility of artists is not to produce officially sanctioned narratives or serve predetermined political purposes, but to create work that is original, intellectually honest and capable of opening new ways of seeing. It is precisely because art resists predictability that it can create spaces for imagining futures that conventional political discourse often cannot.
This understanding also shaped one of the discussion's most revealing exchanges on inclusive memorialisation itself. Asked how she would advise creating monuments designed to embody hope and shared action, Rigney offered a surprisingly cautious response.
"I think we've too many monuments," she admitted. "They tend to very quickly get out of date."
Her concern was not with public remembrance itself, but with the tendency of monuments to fix meaning permanently. Hope, by contrast, is inherently unfinished.
"I'm not sure you could have a monument to hope," she reflected. "Hope is about saying that the world is not yet finished... we can still complete the world."
Instead of monumental certainty, she argued for forms of memorialisation that remain open, participatory and capable of evolving alongside society itself through theatre, installations, storytelling, public debate and other practices that encourage continual engagement rather than symbolic closure.
As the conversation unfolded, these reflections converged around the central question embedded in the title of the British Council project itself: Different Memories, Shared Futures. Must societies develop shared memories before they can build shared futures?
For decades, many approaches to post-conflict reconciliation have implicitly assumed that they must. The hope has often been that societies will eventually converge around a common understanding of the past, creating the basis for democratic coexistence.
Rigney gently challenged this assumption by placing it in historical perspective.
"The idea that every nation has to have a shared memory," she explained, "is very much a nineteenth-century idea linked to the rise of nationalism."
The expectation that every political community should possess one authoritative historical narrative has deep roots in the history of nation-building. Yet contemporary democratic societies may require something different.
"I think now that we're 150 years beyond Renan... we can question the idea that we need a unified memory in order to create a shared future."
Rather than insisting upon one shared memory, Rigney suggested that plural memories may coexist within a shared civic framework. Indeed, she proposed turning the conventional relationship between memory and the future upside down.
"There might be room," she observed, "to think about how we can create the conditions for the future, and that would help us to sort out the memory."
The implications of this inversion are profound.
Much memorialisation practice assumes that societies must first resolve their disagreements about the past before they can move forward together. Rigney suggests the opposite may often be true. Shared futures are not necessarily the outcome of shared memories. Sometimes it is precisely through working together in the present, building institutions, solving practical problems and developing civic trust, that societies gradually acquire the confidence to live with different memories without allowing those differences to become sources of permanent political division.
This perspective also informed her reflections on polarisation. While memory work can undoubtedly contribute to reducing social divisions, Rigney resisted simplistic assumptions that remembrance automatically leads to reconciliation. She pointed to experiences in Northern Ireland where some reconciliation initiatives unintentionally reinforced the very divisions they sought to overcome by institutionalising separate identities and parallel narratives. The challenge, she suggested, is not simply to balance competing memories but to recover forgotten histories of coexistence as stories that remind societies that conflict has never been the only possible way of living together.
Such reflections also introduced an important note of humility. Throughout the discussion, Rigney repeatedly cautioned against expecting too much from memory alone.
Many contemporary conflicts invoke history, but their underlying causes often lie in present-day inequalities, political exclusion, poor governance or social injustice. Memory can illuminate these dynamics, but it cannot resolve them by itself. As she observed, memory activism should never become disconnected from broader forms of civic engagement. Campaigns for historical recognition need not compete with efforts to address environmental degradation, democratic participation or social inequality. On the contrary, they become stronger when connected to wider struggles for a more just society.
Taken together, the conversation offered something more ambitious than a new approach to memorialisation. It proposed a different philosophy of memory itself.
Across post-conflict societies, remembrance will always carry the responsibility of acknowledging suffering, resisting denial and demanding justice. None of this becomes less important. Yet if memory is understood only as preservation, only as the safeguarding of trauma, it risks narrowing society's imagination to avoiding the mistakes of yesterday.
Rigney's work invites another possibility: Memory can also become a resource for imagining futures that have not yet existed. It can recover forgotten traditions of solidarity, acts of civic courage and histories of coexistence that expand rather than constrain political imagination. It can remind societies not only what they lost, but also what earlier generations hoped to create, even when those hopes remained unrealised.
Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of remembering hope. It is not an invitation to soften the pursuit of justice or to move prematurely beyond trauma. It is an invitation to refuse the idea that the past alone determines the limits of the future.
As Rigney put it so simply towards the end of the conversation, hope is ultimately about recognising that "the world is not yet finished."
For societies emerging from violence, there may be no more important lesson that memorialisation can offer.