Nicole S Fox

This chapter provides an overview of how and why narratives that shape national collective memory of past atrocity neglect gender – a neglect that many find shocking given the ubiquity of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in all recorded wars and mass atrocities. These silences transform into contemporary inequalities as who a society remembers and values as a victim shapes access to resources such as education, financial support, and social capital. I suggest ways for scholars to remedy this oversight in research on gender and cases of contentious memory, and how to integrate a feminist lens in various stages of the research and writing process. This includes oversampling strategies, choosing subjects, qualitative data collection strategies, and approaches to analyzing data, including the analytical vitality of listening to the silences and gaps present in qualitative data. Finally, I address the personal cost for the researcher who adopts a feminist interpretive lens when studying gender and memorialization in the context of mass atrocity and SGBV. Gendered gaps in collective memory projects have significant consequences, including devaluing women’s place in the nation and delimiting their roles in the future (regarding leadership opportunities, decision-making positions, economic prosperities, and governing posts).

In this chapter, we draw from the case study of rescue during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to theorize moral decision-making in contexts of mass atrocity. We provide an overview of a core debate regarding the relative influence of internal motivations and external opportunities in shaping rescue behaviors. Recognizing that individuals often explain both rescue and perpetration during genocide in moral terms—and given that some people who rescued also committed violence—we suggest integrating emerging evidence from studies about rescue with existing knowledge regarding the perpetration of violence to develop more holistic models that account for the complexity of individual behavior during genocide. Based on this review, we suggest a starting point for a more comprehensive model to explain moral decision-making during genocide. We conclude by exploring some of the implications of this working model for contemporary atrocity prevention and transitional justice processes.

Atrocity crimes tear apart the social fabric of society. One mechanism communities and nations utilize to begin the healing from atrocity crimes is through the development of physical memorials that aim to commemorate a past fraught with trauma and violence. This chapter begins by defining memorialization, memorials, and commemoration and explores why memorials have become a viable option—for communities, nations, and individuals—in the aftermath of atrocity. It examines the three global social and intellectual movements of the 1990s central to the emergence of contemporary memorial culture: the memory boom, the human rights movement, and the justice cascade. Finally, it analyzes the challenges arising during memorialization aimed at reparation and justice. Like all multifaceted mechanisms of transitional justice, memorialization has both promises and pitfalls as both a process and an outcome.