The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights

2020/06/26 by Lea David · 1 voice · 2 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Turkey's Politics and Society

paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/9781108861311

openalex publication_date 2020/07/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15

Abstract

In this innovative study, Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what happens once this agenda becomes implemented. Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions.

Citations

• Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
• From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?
• Warfare and the Sacralisation of Nations: The Meanings, Rituals and Politics of National Remembrance
• Norms, culture, and world politics: insights from sociology's institutionalism
• THE IMPACT OF THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY
• The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
• National Incorporation of Global Human Rights: Worldwide Expansion of National Human Rights Institutions, 1966-2004
• World Society and the Nation‐State
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• The Europeanization of Holocaust Memory and Eastern Europe
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• ‘Memory must be defended’: Beyond the politics of mnemonical security

Cited by

• The Memory Work of a Far-Right Party: Contention, Convention and Memory Appropriation
• The victims' shoes trope and emerging solidarity in political protest

Discussions

• Sometimes you find a book that helps crystallize previously inchoate thoughts: [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]

Related

• PREAMBULAR HISTORY: THE VIEW OF THE PAST IN KEY HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS
• Three days in December: Jewish human rights between the United Nations and the middle east in 1948
• Global Campus Human Rights Journal, Volume 8. Editorial
• Utopian Dreams or Practical Possibilities? The Challenges of Evaluating the Impact of Memorialization in Societies in Transition
• The Holocaust, the legacy of 1789 and the birth of international human rights law: revisiting the foundation myth