Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter highlights Cambodia’s strong changes in the politics of memory since the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. While a generalized demonization mnemonic dominated during the civil war of the 1980s, Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ‘Win-Win Policy’ placed stronger emphasis on the universal victimhood mnemonic from the mid-1990s onwards. This transition meant a shift from a very broad attribution of responsibility to and generalized demonization of the Khmer Rouge to responsibility narrowed to only the highest leaders and a broad recognition of victimhood, even for former Khmer Rouge. However, today, ambivalence remains as the generalized demonization mnemonic still remains important as a political screen for justifying government power, while universal victimhood including low-level Khmer Rouge forwards reconciliation. Furthermore, ambivalence exists regarding the status of Vietnamese in the country, who are both framed as heroes for saving the country from the Khmer Rouge, but also as the historic enemies, intersecting with opposition attempts to undermine the government. The chapter unpacks how these and more marginalized mnemonic role attributions and ambivalences serve different political interests of Prime Minister Hun Sen and the political opposition at different times.
This concluding chapter succinctly draws together the key theoretical and empirical contributions of the book: the introduction of the concept of mnemonic role attributions, the power of ambivalences, a systematic and comparative approach to applying such an analysis of the politics of memory to the memoryscape, as well as specific insights into specific cases. Briefly, the chapter discusses these insights in the context of the broader literature and demonstrates what potential consequences these insights could have for academic discussions, as well as for practitioners working in post-violence societies.
The chapter interrogates Indonesia’s memoryscape since the 1965/1966 genocide against communists, committed in the context of General Suharto’s takeover of power and serving as a legitimating foundation for his subsequent New Order regime. As such, the violence itself has been valorized and those responsible celebrated as heroes, while the targeted communists have been villainized and remembered as perpetrators (albeit of other crimes of attempting a coup). Communism thus outlived the Cold War era as a strong and menacing threat in Indonesian politics. Even since the transition from the authoritarian ‘New Order’ regime to democracy, little has changed in official memory and the attribution of responsibility and roles, particularly given consistencies across political elites and the importance of specific societal and religious organizations. However, official attributions are questioned and challenged in some cultural heritage projects and increasingly in online spaces, augmenting the memoryscape and allowing unheard voices to attribute alternative roles in new interpretations of the past. The chapter pushes back against the trope of a silence regarding the past in Indonesia, showing how political actors actively mobilize the threat of communism and how survivors of the genocide carve out (marginalized) spaces in which to remember the past in their terms.
The Introduction introduces the central interest of the book on how the past is utilized by political actors in the memoryscape to attain or consolidate power and legitimacy in societies after mass violence. By highlighting previous excellent work on memory and the politics of memory, I show the value of two core arguments made in this book. First, I argue that the main way in which the violent past becomes salient for the political present is through the attribution of roles in memory (mnemonic role attributions), asking who is remembered as a perpetrator, victim, hero, and bystander? Second, I show how ambivalences in the memory of the past allow politicians to mobilize different mnemonic role attributions concurrently. The Introduction also introduces the book’s research approach and fieldwork methods, including interviews and participant observation conducted in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Indonesia. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s structure.
This book explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in post-violence Cambodia, Rwanda and Indonesia, the book demonstrates in what way power is derived from how roles are assigned, exploring who is deemed a perpetrator, victim or hero, as well as uncertainties in this memory.
The author interrogates the ways in which these roles are attributed and ambivalences created in each society’s political discourses, transitional justice processes and cultural heritage. The comparative empirical analysis illustrates the importance of memory for political power and legitimacy today.
This conceptual chapter discusses and deepens the concept of memoryscape as a socio-spatial construct that structures how societies remember the violent past and what politics of memory emerge. Then the two central theoretical ideas that allow for original analysis of this memoryscape are introduced: mnemonic role attributions and ambivalence. First, mnemonic role attributions are introduced as categorizations of actors, their roles, their responsibility, and their suffering as they are remembered regarding a certain period of time. Second, the chapter develops the idea of ambivalence for the collective level, demonstrating how contradictory political attitudes regarding memory of the past can coexist and how these are used by political actors. Subsequently, the chapter unpacks what is meant by the politics of memory, highlighting the importance of political discourse and policy, transitional justice, and cultural heritage, and specifying some fundamental assumptions about how these interact with the theoretical concepts.
This chapter draws together the threads from the three empirical chapters, drawing out patterns and isolating idiosyncrasies of the cases. The chapter makes nine key arguments on how the politics of memory can impact political power in the present, drawing on and developing insights from the three cases with respect to mnemonic role attributions and ambivalences. Subsequently, the chapter presents an extended comparison of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Namibia, and Guatemala. These three short and exploratory case studies serve to demonstrate the utility of the book’s core theoretical concepts as heuristic devices for understanding other empirical cases.
This chapter interrogates the politics of memory after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. In Rwanda, the role of perpetrator is attributed very broadly, expanding beyond the group of people involved in the violence to the entire Hutu group. Also, the notion of victimhood or surviving is augmented to include any Tutsi as a survivor, irrespective of whether they were in the country at the time of the genocide. Furthermore, victimhood is truncated to only recognize victims of certain (albeit the most horrific) crimes committed against the Tutsi population. This excludes Hutu family members of Tutsi victims and victims of crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who have been in power since liberating the country from genocide in 1994. This ambivalence of the RPF as both hero and perpetrator is silenced in the hegemonic narratives on the genocide, while ethnicity constitutes a visible ambivalence in that it is both instrumental to attribution of roles and responsibility in the memory of the genocide, but a taboo category in today’s political interaction. The chapter discusses how these mnemonic role attributions and ambivalences result from Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s political interests.
In the wake of the revolution in Tunisia in 2011 and the promulgation of the new constitution in 2022, there is a heightened demand for accountability and transparency in the management and use of public funds. Evaluation is crucial for authorities to communicate with residents by fostering a shared understanding of issues and potential solutions through an evidence-based approach within a participatory and consensual decision-making framework. Consequently, the institutionalisation of evaluation is essential for ensuring fair, inclusive, and sustainable governance of public entities and facilitating political, economic, and social transformation. This chapter explores whether the new political framework has contributed to the institutionalisation of evaluation in Tunisia or if there remains a need for an integrated and cohesive national monitoring and evaluation system.
This chapter examines Yemen’s political instability and economic weaknesses, which make monitoring and evaluation difficult. The chapter examines Yemen’s political, practice, social, and professionalisation evaluation systems. In-depth interviews with Yemeni evaluation practitioners and stakeholders were conducted as part of the qualitative study. The respondents indicated that Yemeni evaluation methods need to be improved, especially in the government sector. Some respondents mentioned inefficiency, while others noticed advances, especially in the evaluation of humanitarian projects and non-governmental organisations. This research emphasises evaluation implementation challenges such as non-standardised processes, budgetary restrictions, limited evaluation independence, and underuse of local knowledge. The chapter suggests that economic evaluations should be favoured over technical ones. It shows that lack of supervision leads to impromptu practices and budgets, and volatility restricts the efficacy of existing instruments and processes.
