Remembering and dealing with violent past: diasporic experiences and transnational dimensions

ABSTRACT

Much of the world's migration today is driven by civil wars, armed conflicts, genocide and other forms of large-scale violence. These experiences have long-lasting effects on individuals who are forced to migrate and rebuild their lives in new contexts, while coming to terms with the violence they have experienced. The papers in this special issue explore the transnational and transgenerational effects of the violent conflict, focusing on how diasporic communities deal with the memories and legacies of the violent past; how these legacies shape the processes of their integration into new contexts of residence and other dimensions of diasporic existence; and how they affect generations after. The introduction to the special issue discusses some of the findings, highlighting common patterns and themes that emerge from the eight papers and discussing them in the context of scholarship on diaspora, transnational migration, conflict, intergenerational transmission, and memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Memories of violence
• conflict
• diaspora
• intergenerational transmission
• transnationalism

Introduction

Much of the world's migration flows today is driven by civil wars, armed conflicts, genocide, and other forms of large-scale violence against specific groups and communities. Never before in human history have there been so many displaced people in the world.¹ Collective violence has long-lasting effects that transcend national boundaries and generations; its afterlives (Bernal 2017) unfold in different places and across generations, leaving a lasting mark on individuals, societies and institutions. Present and past violence are inextricably linked, as in order to grasp and understand current violence, we compare and contrast it with violence that has already occurred in the past. It is also intertwined with the future, as collective violence gives rise to policies and laws designed to prevent these events from happening again.

Displaced from their homes and forced to rebuild their lives in new places of settlement, people come together to form communities that help them to find their way in a new environment, but also to come to terms with the past and the losses they have suffered. In these challenging processes, the legacies of the past continue to haunt them, affecting different aspects of their private and collective lives, as well as the lives of succeeding generations. How do conflict-affected migrant communities deal with legacies and memories of the past or ongoing violence? How do these legacies of the violent past shape their lives and affect integration processes in new contexts? What happens to the memories of violence as new generations come of age and how do they deal with these legacies?

This special issue explores these questions through eight empirical contributions. It is the outcome of the workshop “Dealing with the violent past: transnational dimensions and diasporic experiences”, held at the University of Zurich in 2021.² The workshop brought together scholars from various disciplines working on different cases of what can be called “conflict-generated” diasporic communities (Féron and Lefort 2018). The papers in this special issue explore the transnational and transgenerational effects of violence, focusing on migrant communities affected by the wars, armed conflicts, genocidal atrocities, and other forms of large-scale violence. All papers are strongly empirical, combining different types of qualitative data (such as biographic-narrative interviews, ethnographic observations, analysis of social media). Another strength of these eight papers is that they combine political and historical analysis with analysis of the personal experiences of individuals. The empirical cases include studies of Bosnian, Chechen, Kurdish, Lebanese, Rwandan, and Ukrainian diasporas in different settlement contexts (Western Europe and North America). The aim of the special issue is to identify common patterns, themes, and parallels, contributing to the fields of diaspora, migration and transnationalism studies, memory studies, and peace and conflict studies.

The study of memory, both in its collective and performative forms (material, memorial) as well as of individual remembering has been at the centre of scholarly interest for several decades now. With the growing relevance of transnational approaches, scholars have turned their attention to the memories of migrant, refugee and/or diasporic populations (Baronian, Besser, and Jansen 2007; Creet and Kitzmann 2011; Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013; Palmberger and Tošić 2016), to the ways in which memories travel and circulate transnationally (Erll 2011; Radstone 2011; Rigney and Cesari 2014; Rothberg 2014), as well as to de – and postcolonial approaches to memory (Rothberg 2009; Terkessidis 2019; Tlostanova 2018; Törnquist-Plewa and Yurchuk 2019).

Within this burgeoning field of scholarship, this special issue seeks to specifically explore memories of the violent past in diasporic contexts. It seems obvious that there is a difference in the way experiences of collective violence are processed by those who stayed at home, and those who left and rebuilt their lives in migrant contexts. Living with the long-term effects of large-scale violence in the homeland – including socio-economic and political instability and frequent eruptions of violent dynamics – may be very different from how the conflict is experienced outside of the home country. At the same time, the contributions to this special issue show that they are also strongly interlinked, and that the political context in the homeland strongly influences the way memory is dealt with in the diaspora. In turn, the political context and legacies of violence in the homeland have an impact on the processes of integration and positioning in the new migrant contexts, also affecting generations that were born and/or socialized outside the homeland. The following paragraphs present some findings and common themes that emerged from eight contributions and gives a short overview of all articles.

Violent past and diaspora-making

Through various studies, scholars have identified a strong link between the legacies and memories of collective violence and the processes of diaspora formation. Collective violence in the form of wars, violent conflicts, genocides and other atrocities is a focal point around which diasporic mobilisation takes place (Adamson 2012; Sökefeld 2006). Scholarship has demonstrated how memory of key violent events or “chosen traumas” and public, commemorative practices around them can trigger diasporic mobilisation (Gül Kaya 2018; Halilovich 2015; Orjuela 2018; Sökefeld 2008; Toivanen and Baser 2019; Volkan 2002). Diasporic mobilisation can develop in the context of transitional justice to hold perpetrators accountable (Haider 2014) or to gain international recognition of the massacres and genocides (Koinova and Karabegović 2017). The transnational agency of diasporic communities can unfold in the context of commemorative practices (Karabegović 2019; Paul 2021). These dynamics influence and are intertwined with many other dimensions and aspects of diasporic existence such as collective identity-formation, intra-diasporic dynamics, relations with the host society, relations between different generations and other aspects (Baser 2013; Blachnicka-Ciacek 2018; Chernobrov and Wilmers 2020; Müller-Suleymanova 2023a).

As Sökefeld has argued, diasporas need to be analysed “as historically contingent social formations that result from processes of mobilisation” (Sökefeld 2008, 280). The notion of “conflict-generated diasporas”, which is also used by the contributors to this volume, presupposes the central role of the conflict in in these processes of mobilization. At the same time, it should not be assumed that the formation of such diaspora communities is solely triggered by conflict (Féron and Lefort 2018). They are constituted by different, successive waves of migration, as in the case of the Yugoslav or Kurdish diaspora communities, which initially emerged from labour migration and were later followed by refugee migration from the region. Despite the dominant constructivist take on diaspora, internal heterogeneity, and cleavages within diasporic communities – with rural-urban, socio-economic, regional, and other divides – are rarely taken seriously and explored within migration and diaspora studies. In this special issue, several contributions explore these differences (generational, political, individual) in relation to the different ways of dealing with and interpreting the violent past (e.g. Féron 2023; Lefort 2023; Müller-Suleymanova 2023b; Paul 2023).

The repercussions of the current full-scale war in Ukraine and of the conflict since 2014 for Ukrainian diaspora in Europe is the subject of two papers in this volume (Amiot 2023; Voytiv 2023). They show how the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe was formed by several waves of migration that began already in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continued during the Soviet period (Amiot 2023). The war in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, as well as the current full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, have set in motion processes of diaspora mobilization, as individuals from these various waves of migration come together, organize collective action, and mobilize to form a consolidated identity in the face of Russian aggression (Voytiv 2023). Here the present violence (the full-scale war) invigorates the past violence, for example the memory of the Holodomor – the man-made mass famine in Ukraine in 1933 – and gives the past violence a new meaning and significance (Amiot 2023). The full-scale war has triggered the recognition of this past by the host societies, with the Holodomor being recognized as a genocide by the French parliament in 2023. With large communities of displaced Ukrainians now living in various European countries, the Ukrainian diaspora has the potential to become an important transnational actor and to be involved in the investigation and prosecution of war crimes, as it was the case after the Bosnian War (1992–1995). Moreover, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has also affected other diaspora communities, such as the Chechens. As Le Huérou & Merlin show in their contribution (2023), new solidarity networks and joint actions have emerged between the Chechen and Ukrainian diasporas in France and Belgium. Voytiv (Féron and Voytiv 2022; Voytiv 2023) proposes to use the concept of “conflict cloud” to analyse how narratives, meanings and imaginaries of specific conflicts circulate globally and are instrumentalised in other conflict contexts. Moreover, as different diaspora communities coming from similar regions (here, the post-Soviet space) and experiencing the same types of violence, settle in a host context, this creates opportunities for cross-referencing, borrowing and diaspora collaboration (Féron 2023).

The contributions to this volume also show that diaspora groups are engaged in efforts to remember and transmit memories of violence within their own communities, but also in efforts to communicate and disseminate knowledge about the violent past within the host country as well as globally. The host context may be more or less favourable to these claims and processes. Public discourses and policies in the host countries have a significant impact on the processes of remembering and coming to terms with the violent past in the diaspora. The case of the Chechen diaspora in the EU shows how the framework of securitization applied to this community by the host countries, together with the suppression of memory in the homeland, has affected the individual transmission and the collective, public memory of the two Chechen wars (Le Huérou and Merlin 2023). Moreover, as Féron's (2023) paper on memories of the Rwandan genocide in the Belgian diaspora shows, the host country, as a colonial power, can be implicated in the historical and political contexts of past violence and promote its own discourses and narratives about this past.

In some cases, the political situation in the countries of origin does not allow for the proper and full recognition and commemoration of atrocities committed, either because they are divided (Bosnia, Lebanon), under repressive regimes (Chechnya), or because the state imposes a particular strict vision of the violent event. When the memory of wars, genocides, and atrocities is denied, and resisted in a deeply divided homeland context, diaspora groups can play a leading role in memorialization and commemoration initiatives (Chernobrov and Wilmers 2020; Karabegović 2019; Paul 2021). An illustrative case is that of Bosnia, where local authorities in the Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska do not allow for the construction of memorials at the sites of former concentration camps in the Prijedor region, and oppose other commemorative activities (Paul 2021; 2023). Such efforts can spur transnational mobilization, as diasporic actors seek to bypass the state and engage directly with local communities, giving rise to translocal diasporic activism and agency, as Paul (2021; 2023) shows in the case of Bosnia. Memory activism is thus an important area of study of transnational engagement by diasporic communities, including various forms of artistic interventions and projects in digital space.

At the same time, in the context of state-sponsored amnesia, suppression and distortion of war memories in the homeland, such as in Lebanon or Chechnya, coming to terms with the traumatic violent past and commemoration in the diaspora is often not possible. As the contributions to this special issue show (Le Huérou and Merlin 2023; Lefort 2023), recent traumatic memories of large-scale violence can be replaced by memories of more “consensual” and uncontroversial events of the more distant past. Chechnya is a case in point here, where in the context of the impossibility of commemorating the two brutal Chechen wars (also because of the widespread fear among members of the diaspora of persecution by the current regime in Chechnya), it is the commemoration of the deportation of Chechens by the Soviet regime in 1944 that rallies the diaspora. The parallel can be found in the Lebanese diaspora in Montreal, which avoids any reference to the Lebanese civil wars, preferring to present itself in public through a less controversial and more distant historical legacy (Lefort 2023).

Populations from conflict zones can be subjected to problematic discourses and securitization frameworks, as was the case with Chechens in various European countries, or also with Syrians following the involvement of some individuals in terrorist attacks (for a critical view on securitization framework, see Féron and Lefort 2018). This can also hinder the processes of coming to terms with the violent past and collective mobilization around it. In particular, it can affect the relationship of subsequent generations with their own community and the host society, as Le Huérou & Merlin show in their paper (2023). Diasporic memories of the violent past, in both their collective and individual dimensions, are thus a contested and conflictual field in which the political context of the country of origin is as important as that of the host country. It is to the individual and generational dimensions of remembering that I turn to now.

Transmission of memories and intergenerational dynamics

One of the key themes running through the papers in this volume, is the issue of intergenerational transmission and the ways in which succeeding generations deal with experiences and memories of violence that they did not experience first-hand. As Hoffman has put it in relation to the descendants of Holocaust survivors (Hoffman 2010, 411): “this is exactly the crux of the second generation’s difficulty: that it has inherited not experience, but its shadows”. Scholarship on the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memories has proved fruitful for the study of diasporic communities affected by violence, and the concept of “postmemory” (Hirsch 2012) is also used by the authors in this special issue. One of the main tensions in this process of transmission seems to be the question of silencing or repressing traumatic memories (Bloch 2018; Kidron 2009). The examples of silencing, avoiding of talking about the past and sharing of memories with their children can be found in several contributions to this special issue (e.g. Féron 2023; Le Huérou and Merlin 2023; Müller-Suleymanova 2023b). However, even when the past is silenced, transmission takes place, but in a more implicit, silent way. As Kidron (2009; 2010) has shown in her research on the memory work of the victims and descendants of genocidal violence, including the Holocaust, the legacies of trauma can be transmitted in non-verbal forms: through emotions, sensations, bodies (tattoos or scars) and through habitual, everyday acts.

The specificity of diasporic communities lies in the fact that coming to terms with the violence experienced before or during forced migration intersects with efforts to rebuild lives in new contexts, with processes of placemaking, finding belonging and home, and ensuring a good life for future generations (Lefort 2022; 2023; Üllen 2017). The silence surrounding problematic and traumatic memories is often driven by the desire to settle and integrate into new contexts, to “move on” and leave the painful and difficult past behind. In particular, several contributions highlight how the first generation tries not to hinder the successful integration of children and not to burden their experiences by passing on trauma and pain to their children (Féron 2023; Le Huérou and Merlin 2023; Lefort 2023). As a result, subsequent generations grow up not with a comprehensive picture of the past, but with fragments, shadows, bits and pieces of knowledge that they have to piece together themselves (Müller-Suleymanova 2022; 2023a).

Interestingly, memories of the violent past can be closely intertwined with nostalgia and memories of peaceful and joyful life before the war (conflict or genocide). Indeed, several contributions (Lefort 2023; Müller-Suleymanova 2023b) highlight how nostalgia can be a flip side of memories of violence for individuals. When destruction, pain and suffering are among the dominant discourses, people long even more for images of peaceful life, and nostalgic narratives become an important way to regain a sense of belonging and home (Lefort 2023; Palmberger 2008; Üllen 2017). Nostalgia can also be articulated by the second and subsequent generations as a way of transcending the violent past and finding alternative articulations of belonging beyond the lines of conflict (Müller-Suleymanova 2022).

While the term “second generation” (along with “succeeding”, “postmigrant” or “generation after”) is widely used by the contributors to this volume to refer to the descendants of migrants in general, this should not obscure the diversity that exists within this broad term. Here, Paul (2023) draws our attention to the notion of the 1.5 generation, which refers to those young people who experienced war and displacement early in their lives and have their own memories of it. They spent their formative years in their country of origin but were consequently socialized in another country. Their experiences therefore differ from those who were born and/or spent their childhood in new residential contexts (see also Rumbaut 2004; Suleiman 2002). They have a specific intergenerational in-between position and a particular relationship with memories of violence, some of which are their own memories, some of which are the memories of significant others (parents, siblings, etc.). This group has been unfairly overlooked by research, although as Paul (2023) or Milivojević and Müller-Suleymanova (2022) have shown, the 1.5 generation has specific experiences and positions.

At the same time, it is not only a question of what is passed on to succeeding generations, but also what they do with this legacy. Is the violent past in their countries of origin relevant to their lives here and now; does it play a role in their everyday realities and struggles? How do they transform and reframe it in the context of their present lives? The contributions to this issue show that this past is indeed relevant for the descendants of migrants. Baser and Toivanen (2023), Féron (2023) and Müller-Suleymanova (2023b) show in their contributions, how legacies of the violent past resurface in everyday life, structure everyday interactions, consciously and unconsciously determine partner choice in romantic relationships, favour endogamy, and are intertwined with constructions and articulations of belonging. The legacies of the violent past also stimulate transnational activism (memory activism, political activism, etc.) of the succeeding generation towards the country of origin (Baser and Toivanen 2023; Hess and Korf 2014; Paul 2023).

Baser and Toivanen (2023) show how the Kurdish question in Turkey is a topic of dinner table conversation in Kurdish families in the diaspora and how this storytelling contributes to their motivation to engage in transnational activities related to the Kurdish cause. In contrast to other cases cited here, the Kurdish case demonstrates an open, proactive approach to communicating about the past within the family. This open discussion encourages a strong politicization of the younger generation's identities. At the same time, Baser & Toivanen emphasize that the impact of the host context – the lack of recognition of Kurdish identity in Germany and other European countries as separate from Turkish – rekindles feelings of victimization and double marginalization among second generation Kurds. Thus, the transmission of memory within the family plays a key role in making sense of one's own positionality and is a motivating factor for the political mobilization of young diaspora Kurds, which is at the same time based on a sense of duty and responsibility towards the first generation and the Kurdish cause (Baser and Toivanen 2023). Thus, the memory of the violent past may be the central mechanism for building and maintaining a homeland-related identity among the younger generation, its central pillar that can politicize the identities of the postmigrant generations and motivate them for transnational activism and engagement in activities related to the country of origin (see also Graf 2018; Hess and Korf 2014; Toivanen 2016).

Research on postmigrant generations shows how young people reframe, reinterpret and repurpose memories and legacies of the violent past that they have implicitly or explicitly inherited from their parents. This generation perceives the past through the lens of their current present, their experiences of discrimination as members of “othered”, ethnicised or racialised “migrant” groups (Ossipow, Counilh, and Chimienti 2019). As such, diasporic youth reframe these experiences and discourses in the context of their current struggles, ideas and discourses that are relevant to them as a generation raised in migrant contexts. As Féron's (2023) contribution shows, second generation Rwandans have reinterpreted the genocide and expanded their understanding of it to include the entire colonial past, and to come to terms with experiences of racialization and discrimination in Belgium. Müller-Suleymanova (2023b) uses the life-stories of postmigrant youth with roots in the former Yugoslavia to show concrete mechanisms and pathways through which young people develop and embrace different ways of belonging to the country of origin and relating to its past that converge with, but also diverge from, those of their parents and ethnic communities.

While the first generation may still be strongly homeland-oriented, the second generation is more preoccupied with the challenges of their postmigrant positioning. These discrepancies and tensions between different generations bring us back to the question of the internal heterogeneity and diversity of diaspora communities. Exploring these multiple, constantly emerging perspectives, reinterpretations, and reframings of the violent past, also in response to emerging conflicts and crises (such as the current war in Ukraine), is one of the promising tropes that at least some of the authors in this issue will continue to work on.

Overview of articles

This section provides a brief overview of the eight contributions, starting with the article by Élise Féron (2023) who looks at the case of second-generation Rwandans in Belgium and their relationship with the history of the Rwandan genocide (1994). She shows how communication about this painful past takes place in the family context and how young people translate the memories of this difficult past so that they make sense and resonate in the country of residence. They reframe these memories for themselves, but also for the wider public, exercising active citizenship in the “here and now” as opposed to the “there and then” in which many first-generation members seem to remain. Furthermore, this reframing of issues related to Rwanda's past is accompanied by a reorganization and rethinking of diasporic divisions and/or solidarities from one generation to the next.

In the second paper, Baher Baser and Mari Toivanen (2023), which analyses the processes of mobilization among second-generation Kurds in Europe and the role of “inherited traumas” in this process. The authors argue that the way in which second-generation diaspora members construct memory differs both from their peers in the ancestral “homeland” and from their parents’ generation. The authors highlight the role of familial memories of persecution and violence, as well as subtly transmitted feelings of responsibility, guilt and gratitude in the family context, in stimulating transnational activism among young diaspora Kurds. They develop their own initiatives that build on these collective memories and inherited traumas but reinterpret and reframe them in the context of the transnationalisation of the Kurdish movement.

In her article on the memorialization of the genocidal atrocities in Prijedor during the Bosnian War (1992–1995), Johanna Paul (2023) examines the case of a travelling art installation Prijedor’92 as a form of transnational commemoration. Through this example, she highlights the role of art interventions in post-conflict memorialization, allowing for the popularization of war crimes through art, engaging wider audiences in reflection and dialogue about atrocities, and mediating traumatic memories across borders, cultures, and generations. In her paper, Paul highlights the experiences of the unfairly overlooked “1.5 generation”, their specific generational position of “in-betweenness”. The author argues that their specific perspectives and experiences have made them increasingly visible and important actors in transnational activism, in the preservation and popularization of traumatic memories in their countries of origin and countries of residence.

In her contribution, Dilyara Müller-Suleymanova shows how conflict in the country of origin, in her case the war in Bosnia (1992–1995), can reverberate in the lives of young people of ex-Yugoslav origin who were born or grew up in Switzerland. By analysing three biographical portraits of young people, she shows how the legacies of the Yugoslav disintegration wars can resurface in their lives and what repercussions this past has on their everyday lives, including their social relations and the ways in which they articulate their sense of belonging. The author demonstrates how the legacies of the violent past can be firmly inscribed in individual biographies and acquire different meanings in the context of the everyday lives and biographies of young diasporic individuals.

The paper by Hervé Amiot (2023) examines the case of memories of the Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, in the Ukrainian diaspora in France. The author shows that even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022), the “critical juncture” of 2014 was a key moment in the reinterpretation of the present through the past (and vice versa), and identifies three core mechanisms in constructing historical analogies: parallelism, causality and implication. This re-framing of the past, in turn, contributed to the recreation of the imagined Ukrainian community and its radical separation from the Russian one.

Sofiya Voytiv's paper (2023) continues the reflection on the Ukrainian case by showing what processes the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered in the Ukrainian and Russian diasporas in Sweden. By analysing the anti-war protest activity in Sweden, she was able to identify some important processes, including the reactivation of memories of past historical traumas (e.g. the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944), but also of more recent events (the invasion of Georgia in 2008), the emergence of new connections and solidarities between different diaspora groups, as well as identity and language shifts among individual diaspora members. As a researcher of Ukrainian origin, she also reflects on her positionality and emotional involvement in the events and how she has dealt with this in her research.

In the following paper, Anne Le Huérou and Aude Merlin zoom in on the Chechen diaspora in France and Belgium. The current regime of memory in Chechnya effectively erases any possibility of public commemoration of the violence and suffering inflicted on the Chechen population during the two Chechen wars (1994–1996; 1999–2009). The ongoing political and institutional violence at “home” continues to reverberate in the diaspora, hindering the processes of commemoration and processing of these traumatic events at both the individual and collective levels. At the same time, the securitization frameworks of host societies have progressively redefined Chechens from war victims to security threats making it increasingly difficult to develop and transmit the memory of the recent wars, especially among the younger generation.

In the final article, Bruno Lefort (2023) explores the memories and experiences of the Lebanese diaspora in Montreal. He analyses the public representations of Lebanese identity, highlighting the ways in which the difficult past of Lebanon's civil wars is silenced or avoided in these representations. He then turns to three individual portraits that show how narratives and memories of the violent past play out in people's experiences of place and belonging in the society in which they live. The author unpacks the tension between displacement and re-emplacement, showing how remembering the past takes multiple forms, but remains essentially connected to the re-inscription of intimate experiences of past time and lost place into “here” and “now” of their everyday life.

Acknowledgements

We would first like to thank the editors of the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies for accepting this special issue, and in particular Amanda Eastell-Bleakley, the managing editor, for guiding us through the publication process and responding effectively to all our enquiries. We are also grateful to the reviewers for their valuable and detailed feedback, which allowed us to improve the papers significantly. Finally, this special issue would not have been possible without the dedicated and motivated work of all the authors and our inspiring discussions during the workshop in Zurich in 2021, which ultimately resulted in this valuable volume.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We would like to thank Fritz Thyssen Foundation and Swiss National Science Foundation for the financial support of the workshop and of the publication process.

Notes

1 108.4 million people were forcibly displaced (as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, and human rights violations) worldwide in 2022 according to the UNHCR Global Trends report: https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-report-2022.

2 The workshop and publication process were financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. The international workshop resulted from the project “Transnationalisation of conflicts: youth from ex-Yugoslav and Turkish diasporas in Switzerland and their relation to homeland conflicts”, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant Nr. 174164).