Theme Leaders: Prof. James Symonds & Prof. Rob van der Laarse

We study the heritage of conflicts through historical archaeology and musealisation of the contemporary past, the (re)presentation of war and concentration camps, testimonies, forensics and Holocaust research. This includes dissonant heritages and contested and multidirectional memory, social forgetting and silencing, spatial erasure and cultural othering, restitution, reparation, looting and the destruction of cultural heritage and property. The theme analyses the heritage of conflicts in the contemporary context of post-conflict and memory wars, the growing commodification and (digital) accessibility of heritage and the role of (dark-)tourism as well as post-conflict reconstruction, reconciliation and local socio-economic development for deeply wounded societies across the world.