How long does the conference run?

The conference is scheduled for two days.

International Conference on Memory, Politics, and Power Relations (ICMPPR)

Name: International Conference on Memory, Politics, and Power Relations (ICMPPR)
Start: 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z
Location: Beirut

Oct 23–23, 2026Beirut, LebanonIn-person

Registration open

The International Conference on Memory, Politics, and Power Relations (ICMPPR-2026) convenes in Phuket, THA, to explore the intricate connections between historical memory, political systems, and the dynamics of power. This event offers a platform for scholars and practitioners to dissect how collective and individual memories are shaped, manipulated, and utilized within political discourse and to understand their impact on governance and international relations. The conference will delve into various facets of memory, from its role in national identity formation to its weaponization in conflicts and its influence on policy-making. Participants will engage with diverse perspectives on how power structures dictate which memories are preserved, promoted, or suppressed, and the resulting implications for social cohesion and political stability.

Committees & topics

Topics
Memory and Power Relations in Society · The Impact of Politics on Collective Memory · Memory as a Tool for Social Change · Power Dynamics in Historical Narratives · Memory and Identity in Authoritarian Regimes · The Role of Memory in Political Discourse · Memory and the Politics of Representation · Collective Memory in Political Movements

Why it matters

The interplay of memory, politics, and power is a fundamental aspect of both domestic and international affairs. Understanding how historical narratives are constructed and deployed is crucial for comprehending contemporary political movements, conflicts, and reconciliation efforts. Governments and non-state actors alike frequently leverage historical memory to legitimize their actions, mobilize support, or delegitimize opponents, making its study essential for informed analysis.

In an era marked by rapid information dissemination and the proliferation of diverse historical interpretations, the ability to critically assess the political uses of memory is more vital than ever. This conference provides a timely opportunity to examine these complex dynamics, offering insights into how societies grapple with their past and how these struggles shape their present and future. The discussions will illuminate the mechanisms through which power relations influence the collective understanding of history.

Furthermore, the conference's focus on power relations within this context highlights the uneven distribution of resources and influence in shaping historical narratives. It underscores the importance of considering whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced when official or dominant historical accounts are formed. This critical lens is indispensable for fostering more inclusive and accurate understandings of history.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the ICMPPR-2026 should focus on developing a robust understanding of the theoretical frameworks that link memory, politics, and power. Familiarity with concepts such as collective memory, historical revisionism, and the politics of remembrance will be highly beneficial. Consider how different political systems, from democracies to authoritarian regimes, approach the management of historical narratives and the implications of these approaches for their domestic and international standing.

It would be advantageous to research case studies where memory has been a significant battleground in political struggles. For instance, examining how post-conflict societies address traumatic pasts, or how nationalist movements selectively invoke historical events, can provide valuable context. Understanding the role of various actors, including state institutions, educational systems, media, and civil society organizations, in shaping public memory is also crucial.

Finally, delegates should consider the ethical dimensions of memory work and the responsibilities that come with interpreting and presenting historical events. Reflect on how different power dynamics can lead to the marginalization or erasure of certain memories and the potential consequences of such actions. Engaging with the conference themes requires a nuanced appreciation of both the constructive and destructive potentials inherent in the political uses of memory.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Germany

Germany has extensively engaged with its difficult past, particularly regarding World War II and the Holocaust, through public remembrance, education, and legal frameworks.

Role in topic

Germany's approach to memory politics, characterized by active remembrance and accountability, serves as a significant case study in how a nation confronts and integrates a traumatic history into its national identity and political discourse. This includes extensive educational programs and memorials.

Japan

Japan's memory politics concerning its wartime history, particularly in East Asia, remains a sensitive and often contentious issue, impacting regional relations.

Role in topic

Japan's historical narratives, especially regarding its actions during World War II, are a frequent subject of international debate. The differing interpretations of history with neighboring countries like KOR and CHN highlight the political implications of memory and its influence on foreign policy and regional stability.

Russia

Russia often employs historical narratives to legitimize its current political actions and reinforce national unity, particularly concerning its Soviet past and World War II.

Role in topic

The Russian government actively shapes historical memory to support its geopolitical objectives and internal cohesion. This includes emphasizing certain aspects of Soviet history and the Great Patriotic War, often leading to differing interpretations from Western nations and countries like UKR and POL.

South Africa

South Africa's post-apartheid transition involved extensive efforts to address historical injustices through truth and reconciliation processes, shaping its national memory.

Role in topic

South Africa's experience with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission provides a compelling example of a nation attempting to forge a collective memory in the aftermath of systemic oppression. This process highlights the challenges and complexities of confronting a painful past for national healing and political stability.

China

China's government maintains tight control over historical narratives, particularly concerning events like the 'Century of Humiliation' and the Communist Revolution, to bolster national pride and political legitimacy.

Role in topic

The Chinese state's active management of historical memory is central to its political system, influencing education, public discourse, and international relations. Narratives often emphasize national resilience and the Communist Party's role in national rejuvenation, impacting its interactions with countries like JPN and USA.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Memory and Power Relations in Society

The relationship between collective memory and power has been a central concern of social theory since Maurice Halbwachs argued in the 1920s that memory is socially constructed within group frameworks. Subsequent scholarship by Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann, and Aleida Assmann demonstrated how states, religious institutions, and dominant social groups curate which events are remembered, commemorated, or silenced — shaping the cultural authority of governing elites. Monuments, national holidays, school curricula, archives, and museums have historically functioned as instruments through which power consolidates legitimacy by anchoring it in a usable past. In the contemporary period, the politics of memory has become a contested global terrain. The toppling of Confederate statues in the United States, the removal of Soviet-era monuments across Central and Eastern Europe following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and debates over colonial-era statuary in the United Kingdom and France have shown how memory disputes track shifting power balances. Marginalized groups increasingly mobilize counter-memories — Indigenous, diasporic, feminist, and post-colonial — to challenge dominant historical frames. UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme and the work of the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights have placed these questions on the multilateral agenda, framing memory as both a human right and a vector of intergroup power.

Key players

The Impact of Politics on Collective Memory

Political authorities have long shaped collective memory through legislation, education, and commemoration. Twentieth-century totalitarian regimes — Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Franco's Spain — pioneered the systematic rewriting of history through purged archives, controlled textbooks, and choreographed anniversaries. Democracies, too, have legislated memory: France's Gayssot Law (1990) criminalizes Holocaust denial, while Poland's 2018 amendment to its Institute of National Remembrance law sought to penalize attributions of Nazi crimes to the Polish nation, triggering diplomatic crises with Israel and the United States. The past decade has seen a marked intensification of state intervention in memory. Russia's 2014 'rehabilitation of Nazism' statute and subsequent restrictions on the Memorial human rights organization — forcibly liquidated in 2021–2022 — illustrate how memory governance can underpin authoritarian consolidation. China's tightening control over public discussion of Tiananmen, the Cultural Revolution, and Xinjiang represents a parallel trajectory. Conversely, transitional-justice contexts in Colombia, Tunisia, and the Western Balkans show how political settlements can institutionalize plural memories through truth commissions and reparations. The Council of Europe and UNESCO have warned that 'memory laws,' whether punitive or prescriptive, risk chilling historical research even when well-intentioned.

Key players

Power Dynamics in Historical Narratives

Who writes history — and whose history is written — has been a central question of historiography since E.H. Carr's 'What Is History?' (1961). Subaltern Studies scholars in South Asia, postcolonial historians in Africa and the Caribbean, and Indigenous scholars in the Americas and Oceania have shown how imperial archives systematically privileged colonizers' perspectives, marginalizing the colonized as objects rather than agents of history. UNESCO's General History of Africa project, launched in 1964 and now in its expanded ninth-volume phase, was an early multilateral attempt to redress this asymmetry. Contemporary disputes over historical narrative shape live diplomatic relations. Japan-South Korea tensions over wartime forced labor and 'comfort women' have repeatedly disrupted bilateral cooperation despite the 2015 bilateral agreement. Turkey's continued rejection of the genocide label for the 1915 mass killing of Armenians remains a recurring point in its relations with the United States, France, and Germany, all of which have formally recognized the genocide. India-Pakistan textbook disputes over Partition, Sino-Japanese disagreement over Nanjing, and Russia-Ukraine clashes over the Holodomor illustrate how narrative power is inseparable from contemporary state interests and international standing.

Key players

Memory and Identity in Authoritarian Regimes

Authoritarian regimes typically treat memory as a strategic asset, fusing official history with national identity to legitimize incumbent rule. The Soviet Union's instrumentalization of the Great Patriotic War, Franco's National-Catholic narrative of the Spanish Civil War, and the Chinese Communist Party's 'patriotic education campaign' launched after 1989 each tied regime survival to a tightly managed past. In each case, alternative memories — of Stalin's terror, Republican Spain, or the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen — were suppressed through censorship, prosecution, and the closure of independent archives and NGOs. The 21st century has seen authoritarian and hybrid regimes refine these tools. Putin's Russia has rebuilt a sacralized WWII narrative, used in domestic mobilization and to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as 'denazification.' Belarus has cracked down on Kurapaty commemorations of Stalinist victims. Xi Jinping's China has promulgated laws criminalizing 'defamation of heroes and martyrs,' while restricting access to Republican-era and Mao-era archives. In each setting, diaspora communities, exiled historians, and digital platforms have become critical sites for preserving counter-memories, raising difficult questions for international human rights bodies about how to protect historical inquiry under repression.

Key players

The Role of Memory in Political Discourse

Political leaders routinely invoke historical memory to frame contemporary choices, an established practice that Yuen Foong Khong and others have analyzed as 'analogical reasoning' in foreign policy. Munich 1938, Vietnam, and Rwanda recur in Western debates over intervention; the 'century of humiliation' anchors Chinese strategic discourse; and the Nakba structures Palestinian political identity. Such invocations are not neutral: they prime publics for particular policy responses and delegitimize alternatives. The last decade has seen historical memory weaponized in unusually direct ways. Russia's framing of Ukraine's government as 'neo-Nazi' and its invocation of WWII memory to justify the 2022 invasion is the most prominent example, but comparable patterns appear in Hungarian invocations of Trianon, Serbian discourse on Kosovo, Israeli–Palestinian competing memories of 1948, and U.S. domestic debates over 1619 and 1776 framings of national origin. Social media has accelerated and fragmented these uses, enabling micro-targeted memory politics and historical disinformation. UNESCO, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe have begun examining the line between legitimate commemorative discourse and incitement.

Key players

Memory and the Politics of Representation

Museums, memorials, films, school textbooks, and digital archives all decide which pasts become publicly visible — and on whose terms. The opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington (2016), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (2005), and Rwanda's Kigali Genocide Memorial (2004) reflect deliberate state choices about how to represent traumatic histories. Conversely, the persistent absence of major memorials to victims of colonial violence in former imperial capitals, and the continued display of contested ethnographic collections in European museums, illustrate gaps in representation that activists and source communities increasingly challenge. Restitution debates have become a central battleground. France's 2017 Ouagadougou commitment to return African cultural objects, Germany's transfer of Benin Bronzes beginning in 2022, and the Netherlands' 2023 returns to Indonesia mark a shift, though the British Museum's retention of the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes signals continuing resistance. Digital representation poses new questions: who controls Wikipedia entries, search-engine results, and AI training data about contested events? UNESCO's 1970 Convention, ICOM's evolving code of ethics, and the work of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues all bear on this rapidly evolving field.

Key players

Collective Memory in Political Movements

Political movements draw on collective memory to construct legitimacy, recruit adherents, and sustain mobilization across generations. The U.S. civil rights movement repeatedly invoked the abolitionist tradition and the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction; Solidarity in Poland drew on Catholic and patriotic memory to challenge communist rule; and the Arab uprisings of 2010–2012 mobilized memories of anti-colonial struggle alongside more recent grievances. Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow's work on contentious politics underscores how 'repertoires of contention' are themselves transmitted through movement memory. Contemporary movements continue this pattern. Hong Kong's 2019–2020 protests invoked the memory of 1989 Tiananmen and the 2014 Umbrella Movement; Chile's 2019 estallido social drew on memory of the Pinochet era and the 1973 coup, ultimately reshaping the constitutional debate; and global climate activism has appropriated civil rights and anti-apartheid frames. At the same time, far-right movements in Europe and the Americas mobilize selective memory — of the Reconquista, the Confederacy, or interwar nationalist regimes — showing that memory-based mobilization is ideologically promiscuous. International actors, including the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly, increasingly recognize commemorative gatherings themselves as protected and contested political acts.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Memory, Politics, and Power Relations (ICMPPR).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Lebanon October 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Conference on Memory, Politics, and Power Relations (ICMPPR)

Oct 23–23, 2026Beirut, LebanonIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Memory and Power Relations in Society · The Impact of Politics on Collective Memory · Memory as a Tool for Social Change · Power Dynamics in Historical Narratives · Memory and Identity in Authoritarian Regimes · The Role of Memory in Political Discourse · Memory and the Politics of Representation · Collective Memory in Political Movements

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Germany

Germany has extensively engaged with its difficult past, particularly regarding World War II and the Holocaust, through public remembrance, education, and legal frameworks.

Role in topic

Japan

Japan's memory politics concerning its wartime history, particularly in East Asia, remains a sensitive and often contentious issue, impacting regional relations.

Role in topic

Russia

Russia often employs historical narratives to legitimize its current political actions and reinforce national unity, particularly concerning its Soviet past and World War II.

Role in topic

South Africa

South Africa's post-apartheid transition involved extensive efforts to address historical injustices through truth and reconciliation processes, shaping its national memory.

Role in topic

China

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Memory and Power Relations in Society

Key players

The Impact of Politics on Collective Memory

Key players

Power Dynamics in Historical Narratives

Key players

Memory and Identity in Authoritarian Regimes

Key players

The Role of Memory in Political Discourse

Key players

Memory and the Politics of Representation

Key players

Collective Memory in Political Movements

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Memory, Politics, and Power Relations (ICMPPR).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Dynamic Analysis

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Lebanon October 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

International Conference on Political History and Comparative Studies (ICPHCPS)

International Conference on Democracy, Political Change, and Gender Studies (ICDPCGS-2026)

International Conference on Historical Sociology and Political Participation (ICSHPP)

International Conference on Military Engineering and Defense Technologies (ICMEDT)

International Conference on Contractual Obligations and Employment Law Practices (ICCOELP)