Keynote Lecture II
Dr. Craig Larkin (King's College London) Remembering Peace: Heritage, Nostalgia and forgetfulness in Lebanon and Iraq
Lebanon (1975–1990) and Iraq (2003–2017) have both endured civil war, foreign intervention, and prolonged militia violence. In both contexts, the consolidation of peace has been hindered by political instability and contested narratives over how to remember—or forget—the traumatic past. Official silence, whether maintained through amnesty laws, institutional amnesia, or inadequate transitional justice mechanisms, has increasingly been challenged by civil society initiatives that seek to reframe collective memory and imagine alternative futures. This paper examines the politics of memory through the rehabilitation of war-damaged sites in Beirut and Mosul—specifically Beit Beirut, The Egg, and Mosul Heritage Foundation and Baytna—highlighting tensions between nostalgic longing, curatorial practice, and the preservation of shared cultural heritage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2022 and 2025, it argues that memories of peace and violence are deeply intertwined, intersecting across spatial and temporal dimensions. Consequently, memory politics remain profoundly ambivalent: depending on framing, agency, and motivation, they can serve either as mechanisms of reconciliation or as tools of division. The findings suggest that organically ambiguous memory sites may offer more generative spaces for engaging with the past than formally curated spaces.