Rethinking Remembrance

Memory stands as one of humanity’s most enduring and vital resources, serving as both a repository of historical knowledge and a mirror to societal evolution. As a collective endeavour, remembrance is often invoked as a source of wisdom, offering guidance to prevent the repetition of past tragedies. Ideally, it acts as a moral compass, ensuring that the lessons of history are internalised to safeguard future generations. However, the practice of memorialisation—whether through monuments, commemorative rituals, or memory laws—often falls short of fulfilling its most profound promise: to prevent the recurrence of violence. In a digital world, those promises of non-reoccurrence take on a new meaning but also offer an opportunity to engage more meaningfully with the learning potential memory has to offer.

Do we truly learn from the past?

The fundamental question is whether societies truly learn from the past. Can commemorative practices such as memorials, museums, and national remembrance days effectively transform attitudes and behaviours to deter violence? Empirical evidence, regrettably, remains scarce. Despite the proliferation of memorialisation practices globally, their tangible impact on reducing violence or fostering reconciliation and healing is often assumed rather than rigorously demonstrated.

For instance, while memory laws are important in justice delivery, suggesting they may also serve as incentives of deterrence, their effectiveness in transforming behaviours or attitudes remains largely speculative. Similarly, while monuments honour the fallen, they often become static relics of the past, disconnected from the dynamic needs of modern communities. If visitors are primarily tourists or those with a direct personal connection to the commemorated events, how much can these spaces truly influence societal attitudes on a broader scale? What is clear, however, is that slogans like “Never Again” risk becoming empty promises unless they are tied to actionable strategies and measurable outcomes.

The limits of symbolism: from aspirations to actions

There is a growing critique of the placebo effect of memory and its ‘fetishisation’—the tendency to treat memorialisation as an all-encompassing solution to societal wounds. Symbolic reparations, such as monuments and commemorative rituals, undoubtedly have value in acknowledging loss and fostering collective sentiments – at least initially. Yet, their potential to foster meaningful and long-term change remains limited if they fail to engage critically with the conditions that allow violence to occur. A compelling critique emerges against the over-reliance on memory. Scholars and practitioners have urged the need to ‘repair symbolic reparations’. By shifting the focus from memory’s symbolic potential to its practical implications, memorialisation should go beyond aspirations for a more moral and just society that only promises healing for victims. However, these aspirations often lack the necessary empirical grounding to produce meaningful outcomes.

Adopting an evidence-based approach to memorialisation requires moving beyond prescriptive frameworks of “dealing with the past,” which prioritise moral remembrance or view memory as a civic duty. Instead, these critical voices suggest that there must be a critical interrogation of whether memorialisation can consistently foster human rights values or if such efforts merely serve as symbolic gestures. This interrogation invites rethinking the interplay between memory, education, justice, and reconciliation in a way that yields tangible and measurable outcomes. Such a shift would involve systematic evaluations of the effectiveness of these practices, challenging long-held assumptions about their inherent value.

Addressing causes, not just consequences

Traditional approaches to memorialisation tend to focus disproportionately on the consequences of violence—honouring victims, commemorating loss, and fostering collective unity through mourning. While these practices are important for processing trauma and acknowledging suffering, they often overlook the root causes of violence. This omission is not incidental; addressing the underlying factors of violence often involves confronting uncomfortable truths about political failures, social inequalities, and systemic injustices. Wars, genocides, and acts of terrorism are rarely the result of isolated or spontaneous events. Instead, they emerge from long-standing historical, political, and economic issues. Yet, these complexities are often excluded from mainstream commemorative narratives, as they risk sparking controversy and demand for accountability. Alternatively, these are used to reactivate the conflict, exploiting the divisive potential of the past.

By sidestepping these difficult conversations, societies remain vulnerable to repeating the same patterns of violence. To address this gap, memorialisation must move beyond the act of commemorating loss and engage directly with the structural causes of violence. For example, rather than focusing solely on the victims of a specific atrocity, memorials should also educate visitors about the historical, political, and economic conditions that allowed such events to unfold. This approach would encourage not only empathy for the victims but also a deeper understanding of systemic issues, equipping individuals with the tools to recognise and challenge these patterns in the future.

Envisioning a more transformative approach to memorialisation

Memory as our societal learning capital is currently operating with instant memorial solutions that often encapsulate only the experience of victimisation (individual and collective) rather than also incorporating knowledge of the past. To enhance the preventative potential of memorialisation, efforts must transcend mere commemoration and actively engage with systemic prevention strategies grounded in education, critical reflection, and collective action. Educationally focused memorials should emphasise historical context, equipping visitors with an understanding of the social, political, and economic conditions that foster violence. Such spaces, when combined with interactive learning tools—museums, workshops, or multimedia installations—can encourage critical engagement with the factors underpinning societal conflicts.

Locally owned and contextually relevant memorials can further foster community dialogue and promote inclusive narratives. These spaces must challenge simplistic dichotomies, such as “good versus evil” or “us versus them”, which often perpetuate the divisive ideologies underlying violence. Survivor testimonies and diverse perspectives play a vital role in humanising abstract discussions, offering nuanced insights into the causes and consequences of violence. By incorporating these narratives, memorials can facilitate e.g., reconciliation and challenge stereotypes that hinder societal cohesion.

Additionally, embedding forward-looking messages advocating for peace, justice, and equality into memorialisation initiatives can inspire proactive engagement. Programs and pledges linked to memorials may empower visitors to take action within their communities. By addressing contemporary issues such as systemic injustice, hate, and violence, memorials can become a sustainable investment into the future, able to prolong their relevance and impact over time. However, the long-term success of such efforts requires consistent monitoring and evaluation to assess their educational and societal contributions.

Pitfalls and opportunities: from offline to online memorialisation

The online environment era offers opportunities to effectively leverage the potential of memory. In this sense, digital remembrance refers to the use of digital technologies and platforms to preserve, commemorate, and engage with memories of individuals, events, or cultural heritage. It combines traditional forms and tools of remembrance with the capabilities of digital tools, creating a modern, often more accessible and interactive way of memorialising. In addition, it offers us a way to harvest results and track the impact of remembrance through big data. For example, the library of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) holds the archives of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. It consists of film footage, written documents, metal disk recordings of the hearings and several exhibits. To facilitate the long-term conservation of the intellectual content, the paper and audio-visual components of the archives have been digitalised. Such virtual tribunals offer access to court transcripts, indictments, sentences, and briefings, adding to the long-term impact of trials held after the Second World War. By digitalising such archives, we can easily track and monitor their use through e.g., download information or geospatial tracking.

Digital archives increase the accessibility of historical evidence but are also increasingly serving as a way to create heritage from offline memorials and make memories accessible to a global audience. For example, the Manchester Together archive, created after the terrorist attack in 2017, has now collected and processed over 10,000 objects left as tributes by members of the public in spontaneous memorials around Manchester following the incident. Across the world, other major mass victimisation events have used the digitalisation approach to break barriers of location and physical space, adding an afterlife to spontaneous memorials, which are fundamentally ephemeral in their original form. Preservation and heritagization of offline memories into digital content can safeguard them against the degradation and loss associated with physical media, ensuring that they endure for future generations. However, the mass accumulation of all things memorial also invites a reflection on the excesses of memory as an ever-accumulating commodity.

Digital tools, such as virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR), allow users to engage with memorial content in immersive ways, making the experience more impactful and meaningful. In certain cases, such digital technologies allow museum visitors or students in education settings a valuable opportunity to engage directly with distant memories. The National Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, already in 2017, piloted a ground-breaking project showing 3D holograms of Holocaust survivors telling their stories and answering questions from visitors. Since then, many other historical and cultural institutions have successfully implanted the ‘survivor holograms’ in the urgent effort to preserve the experience of Holocaust survivors in the ‘post-witness era.’ These innovations offer new regimes of mediation and immersion, suggesting future obsolescence of the physical (the fragile body of the survivor). In the same manner, they are forcing us to rethink what form of memorialisation might resist entropy and how memorialisation’s aspiration to heterotopias, permanence and eternity might come to fulfilment or not.

Indubitably, digital platforms allow users to personalise how they interact with memories, fostering a deeper emotional connection and, therefore, offering a myriad of educational opportunities. Digital memorials can incorporate multimedia elements, such as videos, photos, and text, to provide rich educational experiences that traditional memorials might lack. In addition, the added value of digital memory resides in its potential to bridge generations and increase reach to younger audiences – native to digital environments, ensuring the continuity of memory and awareness. However, the opportunities that come with the digitalisation of memory also carry some risks that should not be taken lightly. Falsification of knowledge – either of the past (history) or the present (fake news) – becomes harder to monitor and sanction in digital environments. Technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence) have unprecedented reach and impact, yet the ethical underpinnings of knowledge production and delivery of these complex algorithms remain hard to grasp. If asked how it combats historical revisionism, Open AI – ChatGPT, for instance, suggests that it is ‘most effective as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, rigorous research and media literacy efforts’ and that it relies on trusted data sources, verifies them to ensure neutrality and bias reduction.

Yet, the falsification of knowledge is only one side of the coin, the other being the abuse of experiences to assist extremist ideologies. Research shows that extremists are increasingly using mainstream video games and gaming chat platforms to spread hate and acquire surrogate experiences of acting as perpetrators of crimes. These, for instance, include the creation of Nazi concentration camps, the holding of online Nazi rallies or the management of an Uyghur detainment camp in games such as Roblox and Minecraft. As an underregulated environment, these digital spaces point out our extreme vulnerability to cultures of violence making the need for a more effective engagement with the past even more poignant.

From memory to action: bridging the gap

The challenge with memory lies in transforming remembrance from a passive act into a dynamic process of learning, reflection, and action. Transforming memorialisation into an effective mechanism for violence prevention demands a shift from conventional practices. It demands the adoption of an evidence-based approach to offline memorialisation, rigorously evaluating its outcomes and challenging its assumptions. Trials, monuments, and commemorative rituals must be designed not merely as symbolic gestures but as catalysts for systemic change. Digital tools offer opportunities to leverage the potential of memory. By confronting difficult truths, fostering collaboration, and prioritising prevention, we can ensure that memory serves not only as a damage management instrument but also as an effective tool for building a more just and peaceful future.