Where Conflict and Peace Take Place: Memorialization, Sacralization and Post-Conflict Space

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the disruptive potential of memory in peacebuilding processes where and when they materialize in the built environment. There is a diverse literature on how museums, memorials and sculpture are used to signify, electively narrate or even erase history and condensed forms of heritage (Schramm 2011). However, there is comparatively less work on how such processes confront mainstream policy communities concerned with place-making in uncertain and vulnerable post-conflict conditions. This analysis aims to evaluate the confrontation between public policy (in planning, urban management and development) with places that are loaded with meaning and memory for ethnic groups determined to legitimate their past as well as their future claims. It sets the context by conceptualizing the technical routines of planning and its concern with mediating interests, communicative action and collaborative practice, with the need to understand how space is socially constructed and, in particular, how memorialization elevates place from the mundane to the sacred.