How societies remember violent pasts has become one of the defining political questions of our time.
Across the world, memories of war, repression and historical injustice continue to shape public debate, influence elections, determine who belongs within the political community and define the boundaries of what societies imagine to be possible. Far from fading with time, contested histories often become increasingly central to contemporary politics, mobilised by political leaders, amplified through media and reproduced through education, commemorative practices and public discourse. In societies emerging from conflict, memory is therefore never simply about the past. It becomes one of the principal ways through which the future itself is negotiated.
For many years, memorialisation was understood primarily as an ethical undertaking. It sought to honour victims, preserve historical truth, acknowledge suffering and prevent denial. These remain indispensable responsibilities. Yet experience from the Western Balkans, as well as from many other post-conflict societies, demonstrates that remembrance alone cannot transform the conditions that allow violence and exclusion to persist.
Memorials can acknowledge suffering, but they can also reinforce division. Commemorations can create empathy, but they can also deepen competitive victimhood. Historical truth can establish facts, yet facts alone rarely determine how societies choose to live together afterwards.
These realities invite a different question. Rather than asking only how societies should remember, we must also ask what kinds of relationships different practices of remembrance make possible. Can memorialisation contribute not only to acknowledging the past, but also to strengthening democratic culture? Can it help societies move beyond simplified narratives without requiring agreement on history? Can remembering become not merely an act of preservation, but a practice through which citizens learn to inhabit shared civic space despite continuing disagreement about the past?
It is around these questions that the Different Memories, Shared Futures webinar series was conceived. Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of memory, peacebuilding, transitional justice and democratic resilience, the series – hosted by Refik Hodzic – explores memorialisation not as a static act of remembrance but as a living social and political practice.
The conversations move beyond familiar debates about monuments, museums and commemorations to examine the deeper processes through which collective trauma shapes narratives, narratives shape politics, and politics, in turn, shapes the possibilities for more inclusive futures.
The essays collected in the DMSF Brochure, which are entirely based on the conversations hosted in the webinar series, follow that intellectual journey.
Frauke de Weijer and Dr. Alison Castel begin by examining how collective trauma reorganises the narratives through which societies make sense of themselves, reminding us that memorialisation is ultimately about engaging with systems of meaning rather than preserving isolated stories.
Mark Freeman explores how those narratives become intertwined with processes of political polarisation, demonstrating that democratic resilience depends upon protecting the space in which disagreement remains possible without becoming existential conflict.
Professor Ann Rigney invites us to reconsider memory itself, arguing that societies must remember not only suffering but also solidarity, civic courage and the many moments in which people resisted violence and imagined different futures.
Finally, Professor Denisa Kostovicova shows that memory has become one of the central arenas of democratic contestation, asking not whether remembrance should be political, but what kind of politics different forms of remembrance sustain.
Taken together, these conversations suggest that inclusive memorialisation is not about producing a single shared narrative of the past. Such an ambition would neither be realistic nor desirable in plural societies shaped by profoundly different experiences of violence.
Rather, inclusive memorialisation seeks to cultivate something both more modest and more transformative: the democratic capacity to hold different memories in conversation without allowing them to become permanent instruments of exclusion. It asks how societies can preserve historical truth while expanding empathy, acknowledge suffering without reducing identity to victimhood, and confront difficult histories while keeping open the possibility of shared futures.
At a time when democratic societies around the world face rising polarisation, shrinking civic space and renewed attempts to weaponise history for political mobilisation, these questions reach far beyond the Western Balkans. The challenge is no longer simply how we remember the past. It is whether our ways of remembering enlarge or diminish our collective capacity to imagine living together in the future.