In societies shaped by war, memory is never neutral. It lives in monuments and museums, in school textbooks and political speeches, in graffiti, commemorations, and silences. Across the Western Balkans, where the legacies of the conflicts of the 1990s remain deeply embedded in political and social life, memorialisation has become one of the last truly “alive” arenas of transitional justice, a contested space where societies continue to negotiate what happened, who suffered, who bears responsibility, and what kind of future remains possible.
But what happens when memory itself becomes a source of division?
This question lay at the heart of the latest conversation in the British Council webinar series Different Memories, Shared Futures: Towards Inclusive Memorialisation in the Western Balkans, featuring Mark Freeman, Executive Director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, in discussion with Refik Hodžić. Drawing on decades of work in transitional justice, conflict resolution, and democratic transformation, Freeman explored the increasingly urgent nexus between memorialisation, transitional justice, and political polarisation.
The conversation arrived at a moment of growing anxiety not only in the Western Balkans, but globally. Across democracies and post-conflict societies alike, political actors are increasingly mobilising memory as a tool of division. Competing narratives of the past are no longer confined to academic debate or commemorative rituals; they are becoming central instruments in wider struggles over identity, legitimacy, and power.
Freeman describes polarisation as a “hyper-problem”: a problem so fundamental that failure to address it undermines the possibility of solving almost everything else.
“Polarization,” he explained, “refers to poles or polarities. This implies distance, not proximity.” But division alone is not enough to constitute polarisation. The second ingredient is radicalisation: the tendency of groups to increasingly romanticise themselves while demonising others. Combined, these dynamics create what Freeman called a “centrifugal effect”, a shrinking of the middle ground and a hardening of identities.
For societies emerging from mass violence, this dynamic poses a profound challenge. Transitional justice mechanisms - trials, truth commissions, reparations, memorials - were often designed with the hope of helping societies move toward reconciliation or democratic stability. Yet Freeman argued that transitional justice itself has sometimes become disconnected from the broader political realities it seeks to influence.
Over time, he suggested, transitional justice evolved into what he called a “free-floating exercise,” insulated from politics and treated as though justice processes could somehow exist outside social contestation.
“I take a different view,” Freeman said. “If they are conducted in a vacuum, disconnected from the realities of the society and political system, they are unlikely to be sustainable. In fact, they may even contribute to polarization.”
This observation is particularly resonant in the Western Balkans, where many formal transitional justice processes have stalled or lost legitimacy, while battles over memory continue to intensify. Courts may issue judgments, but competing communities frequently reject them. Truths established in legal forums do not necessarily become socially shared truths. Instead, official narratives are increasingly challenged by alternative forms of memorialisation, some inclusive and reflective, others openly exclusionary.
In this environment, memorialisation occupies a uniquely sensitive position.
Freeman framed memorialisation fundamentally as a form of speech. In democratic societies, he argued, memory contestation is not only inevitable but potentially healthy.
“Memory is a battleground,” he said. “If those battles are peaceful, they can be healthy.”
This perspective pushes against the assumption that societies emerging from violence must eventually arrive at a single, unified narrative of the past. Instead, Freeman suggested that democratic resilience may depend precisely on the ability to tolerate disagreement over memory, provided such disagreement does not cross into incitement or dehumanisation.
The distinction is crucial.
Throughout the conversation, participants repeatedly returned to the difficult question of where societies should draw the line between freedom of expression and harmful forms of memorialisation. In the Western Balkans, this dilemma is far from theoretical. Memorials celebrating convicted war criminals, denial of atrocities, and ethnically exclusive commemorations remain deeply contentious realities.
Nikolas Pantelick, a fellow with the Post-Conflict Research Center in Bosnia and Herzegovina, posed perhaps the central moral dilemma of the discussion: can memorialisation truly be considered “peaceful” when victims experience the glorification of perpetrators as a continuation of violence?
Freeman acknowledged the complexity directly. Drawing parallels to debates around hate speech, he argued that societies must carefully negotiate these boundaries themselves, often shaped by their own histories of trauma and violence.
“I am Jewish,” he noted. “Would I want to see a monument to Nazis in front of my house? Absolutely not.” Yet he cautioned against overly simplistic solutions rooted in censorship alone. “The way to respond to speech we don’t like is with more speech, not censorship.”
The conversation repeatedly circled back to the tension between democratic openness and the dangers of polarising narratives. What happens when states themselves become active “memory police,” controlling who has the right to remember and how? What happens when political leaders deliberately cultivate division through selective narratives of victimhood and heroism?
For Freeman, the answer lies partly in recognising that polarisation does not emerge only because of “conflict entrepreneurs”- political actors who manipulate division - but because broader social conditions allow those strategies to resonate.
“We cannot simply blame the individuals,” he argued. “We must also examine the broader societal and political environment that allows polarization to flourish.”
That insight has profound implications for memorialisation work. If memory practices are embedded within wider political cultures, then memorialisation cannot be approached merely as symbolic or cultural work. It becomes inseparable from questions of democratic space, civic freedoms, and social trust.
Freeman argued that one sign of civic health is precisely the existence of contestation against “official memory”.
“If we end up in a world of sacred truths,” he warned, “that becomes problematic.”
This does not mean abandoning facts or accountability. Rather, it reflects an understanding that societies process traumatic histories not only through legal determinations but through emotionally and politically charged narratives that evolve over time. Memorialisation becomes part of an ongoing democratic negotiation rather than a final destination.
Yet such openness also carries risks, especially for those willing to challenge dominant narratives within their own communities.
One of the most striking themes of the discussion was Freeman’s emphasis on “risk-takers” - individuals who publicly question their own group’s certainties or engage across deeply polarised divides. These figures, he argued, are indispensable to depolarisation, but they are also exceptionally vulnerable.
“Most people will not take major risks,” Freeman observed. “Their reputations may be destroyed. They may be threatened, and their families may be threatened with harm.”
In highly polarised societies, dissent within one’s own in-group can carry enormous social and political costs. Individuals who challenge dominant memory narratives often face accusations of betrayal, harassment, or ostracism. Across the Western Balkans, journalists, activists, artists, and scholars who attempt to complicate nationalist narratives frequently encounter precisely these pressures.
Freeman argued that societies serious about depolarisation must therefore invest in protecting such people legally, politically, and socially.
At the same time, he stressed that public confrontation alone is rarely enough. Much of the real work of depolarisation, he suggested, happens quietly: through back channels, trust-building, private engagement, and what he described as forms of “civic diplomacy.”
“If the goal is to see someone publicly dissent against their in-group,” Freeman explained, “you need to build the path and the bridge toward that.”
This insight carries important implications for memorialisation initiatives in the region. Inclusive memorialisation cannot simply be imposed through institutional declarations or symbolic gestures. It requires sustained work to create conditions in which people can encounter complexity without immediately perceiving it as existential threat.
That may involve small confidence-building measures, local initiatives, artistic collaborations, or informal dialogues that rarely make headlines. It may require creating spaces where individuals can privately question inherited narratives before doing so publicly. And it may mean accepting that progress is often nonlinear and fragile.
Throughout the discussion, Freeman returned repeatedly to the importance of realism. Transitional justice, he argued, cannot afford to operate as though the global political context has not fundamentally changed.
“The external conditions needed for an embrace of quality transitional justice have been dramatically weakened,” he said. “They are now at their lowest point since the field’s origins.”
Rising authoritarianism, democratic erosion, geopolitical instability, and renewed identity politics have all transformed the landscape in which memory and justice operate. Yet Freeman rejected the idea that this means transitional justice has become obsolete.
Instead, he offered a metaphor: “When the music changes, the dance must also change.”
The challenge, then, is not whether societies should abandon the goals of transitional justice, but how those goals must adapt to contemporary realities. For Freeman, this means moving away from overly legalistic or closure-oriented models and toward approaches that are politically aware, socially embedded, and sensitive to polarisation dynamics.
It also means recognising that memorialisation is not peripheral to democratic life, but central to it.
In deeply divided societies, memory can harden identities and deepen resentment. But it can also create openings for empathy, reflection, and complexity. Memorialisation can reinforce exclusionary myths, or it can invite societies to confront uncomfortable truths without collapsing into new forms of violence.
The difference may ultimately depend less on achieving consensus than on preserving the democratic space in which disagreement remains possible.
That is perhaps the central lesson emerging from the Different Memories, Shared Futures conversation series: that inclusive memorialisation is not about erasing difference, nor about enforcing singular truths. It is about building societies resilient enough to live with contested memories without allowing those contests to become pathways back to dehumanisation and conflict.
In the Western Balkans, where the past remains intensely present, that task may be among the most difficult, and most necessary, democratic projects of all.