Anastasiia Vorobiova, a research assistant in the MEMOCRACY team at the Polish Academy of Sciences, has published a blog post in Völkerrechtsblog, about promotion of war-themed games among children in the biggest Russian museum of military history. She focuses on the “Victory tree” quest conducted for children aged from six to twelve, which in this year’s edition is not limited to recreating events of the “glorious” military past, but aims to allure to the present by using the letter ‘Z’ (which is now associated with a Russian invasion to Ukraine) in the Cyrillic event title. She underscores that Russia’s practice of using museums to disseminate government-dictated historical narratives with questionable geopolitical references and putting them in a game form is inconsistent both with the cultural rights’ aspect of memorization and children’s best interests in relation to play and leisure.

Dr. Paula Rhein-Fischer, a post-doctoral researcher in the MEMOCRACY team at the University of Cologne, has published a blog post in Verfassungsblog, detailing the extent of the law adopted by German Parliament, which will extend the scope of legally protected historical truths to include genocides, war crimes and crimes against humanity. She underscores that the reform, which was prompted by the EU framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia, exceeds the EU demands in one important aspect by not requiring the historical crimes to have been established by a decision of a national or international court.

Dr. Uladzislau Belavusau, Senior Researcher in EU law at the T.M.C. Asser institute and head of the Dutch team of the MEMOCRACY project, authored a blog post on Verfassungsblog regarding the history and state of memory laws in Belarus since 1991. He walks through the history of Belarusian memory laws and mnemonic constitutionalism by illustrating four different periods of memory law development, how these changes eventually culminated in the ‘year of historical memory’ in Belarus – within which the state’s propaganda machine vis-à-vis historical memory was turned into overdrive, and how Łukašenka’s grip on power has been indispensable in reaching the dire point that Belarus currently finds itself in – where its view and policies of history now essentially align with that of Putin’s Russia.

Click here to read the first newsletter from the MEMOCRACY Research Consortium.

Maria Mälksoo, Who’s afraid of memory laws? Introducing ‘militant memocracy’ in International Relations, British International Studies Association, 13 April 2021.

Maria Mälksoo discusses her new article in BISA journal Review of International Studies (RIS), available on FirstViewnow. The article investigates status-seeking through memory laws on the example of Russia, Poland and Ukraine’s governance of historical memory.

Read more at https://www.bisa.ac.uk/articles/whos-afraid-memory-laws-introducing-militant-memocracy-international-relations.

MEMOCRACY post-doctoral researchers Dr. Dovilė Sagatienė (Copenhagen University), Dr. Anna Wójcik (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Dr. Paula Rhein-Fischer (University of Cologne) jointly authored a blog post on reaction mechanisms in Lithuania, Germany, and Poland to Putin’s Russia war symbols.