Mass Violence and Its Aftermath

This book offers a uniquely broad collection of theoretical and case-based deep dives into controversies over memory, healing, and rebuilding in post-atrocity settings. Chunhui Peng and Henry C. Theriault bring together an international team of established and emerging scholars to offer new theoretical frameworks for understanding how reparative action has functioned in the past as well as models for approaching new contexts. These contributions are complemented by a broad geographical range of case-studies covering aftermaths of mass violence in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, South Africa, Guatemala, and Crimea, as well as the Armenian genocide. Along the way, the book engages issues of memory and denial, public education, material impacts, psychological trauma, and societal deformation and rehabilitation, all while considering micro-, macro-, and meso-level impacts of mass violence and resulting social and political dynamics of longstanding impediments to reconciliation and the restoration of victim communities. The end result is a series of new connections between culture and memory to issues of transition, reconciliation, and justice after atrocity.