Heritage and Violence

For a long time, heritage has been associated with positive and productive values: the construction of ideas of community and nation and even international identities. During the last decade and a half, however, there has been a growing concern with the legacies of violence, the product of a hundred years of global, civil and ethnic wars, genocides, colonialism and dictatorship. This is a fast-growing subfield in heritage studies and the deployment of heritage consumption. In this chapter, we will set out some of the prevalent characteristics of legacies of violence and conflict; together, these broadly frame heritage work in this area. We then look at civil conflict and violence perpetrated by the state, and at circumstances where the heritage of violence has an international dimension. Focusing on more detailed cases helps understand the specific dynamics that give this subfield of heritage its distinctiveness. We have chosen state violence across a range of countries in South America and ethnically organized conflict in Sri Lanka; there are of course many other cases that would serve equally well. Finally, we look at issues of engaged practice and “memory work”; aspects of this subfield that, we argue, will be of increasing importance in the future.