Abstract
This special section, entitled “Memory Wars,” marks the twentieth anniversary of Cultural Politics and was initiated a few months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Taking as a cue the question of a belligerent revision of history, the journal convened a symposium on “memory wars” in collaboration with the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, in June 2023. Geopolitical alignments of Europe and the United States around Ukraine have been catalyzed since by the incursion of Hamas fighters into Israel on October 7, 2023, and the campaign of extermination that has been subsequently waged by Israel on the Gaza Strip. The contributions to this special section engage the current, militarized politics of memory through the premise of increasingly authoritarian forms of liberalism—such militant liberalism is consolidated around an essentially epigonal understanding of the world, which combines reified languages of Holocaust memory culture with refurbished binaries of the Cold War. Entries range from the Russia-NATO war in Ukraine (Tarik Cyril Amar in conversation with Tania Roy), through the cultural domain of Germany and the limits of liberal freedoms of speech and artistic expression before and after October 7 (ruangrupa in conversation with Sophie Goltz), to the crisis of Israel-Palestine now (Ayelet Ben-Yishai).
