Böcker i Studies in Post-Conflict Cultu-serien

Within the human sciences, as in the ever-growing field of memory and trauma studies, works on memories and post-memories of conflicts have been numerous. They have explored the ways in which the representation of individual and collective memories are closely linked to the building and rebuilding of national and transnational, local and diasporic cultures. Yet, even within such studies, rarely has the category of post-conflict been associated directly with that of culture, that is to an interpretation of conflicts, collective violence and wars, centred on the disruption of symbolic systems of cultural reproduction. This cultural dimension is what the Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures series has dedicated itself to investigating. This landmark anthology offers a generous selection from its ten volumes so far published.

Recent military interventions in Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst others, have placed conflict again at the forefront of international debate. Yet the theoretical analysis of conflicts and of their social and psychological impacts has predictably lagged behind such tumultuous events. Moreover, while scholarship in the areas of strategic studies, international relations and peace studies has addressed the issues in terms of "conflict resolution" and "post-conflict reconstruction", little or no attention has been given to crucial interrelations between conflict and culture. Bringing together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, International Law, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Theory and Semiotics, Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation therefore employs an avowedly interdisciplinary approach in order to address what the editors perceive to be a significant omission. In five themed sections, this ambitious volume tackles many questions often excluded from discourses on conflict. How does a past conflict inform a community's vision for its future? How are conflicts represented in the media, in literature, in journalism, in all forms of cultural expression? How do representations of conflict compound but also confuse, and even reconfigure, cultural identities? What role do histories of conflicts play in the construction of national identities? Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation will be of direct interest to scholars and practitioners working in media and communications, international relations and international law, peace studies, human rights, cultural studies and cultural memory, psychoanalysis and gender studies, and comparative literature and literary theory.