Boris Cyrulnik is a neuropsychiatrist who is known in France for having developed and popularized the concept of resilience. Born to a Jewish family in Bordeaux in 1937, he lost both his parents during the Second World War and, at the age of 6, escaped deportation himself by hiding during a round-up of Jews organized by the Nazis. His recollections of that event, forty years after the end of the war, provided the foundations for a reflection on post-war traumatic memory. In this interview for the Review, he talks about the relationship between memory, trauma and resilience, both at an individual and a collective level.

Drawing on a corpus of accounts written by survivor children in 2006, this article looks at the Tutsi genocide through the eyes of children, enabling us to see the radical social and emotional transgressions of 1994 from a new angle. As members of society and prime targets of the genocide, these children tell how the world of their childhood was turned upside-down, through the unique intensity of their own words. An idealized “before”, inhabited by the beloved characters of their parents, brothers and sisters, is brutally swept away as everything they have known becomes inverted. Forced to watch killings and cruelty, they adopt survival strategies that show how thoroughly they understand the radical nature of what is unfolding. An extreme distrust of adults will forever mark these children – now orphans – who still live in “the time of the genocide”.

Is remembrance an absolute moral duty or is it better thought of in more ethically constricted pragmatic and empirical terms? This essay argues that both individuals and societies should strive for remembrance where possible, but accept that there are times and places where more forgetting is the only safe choice to make. One may hope that at some point in the future the need to remember will sweep away a prudential decision to forget, but while we are within our moral rights to hope that, in a given case, forgetting itself will outlive its usefulness, conflating our wishes with teleological certainties is an exercise in hubris, not morality. But on no account should memory be thought of as a categorical imperative.

Traumatic memories of war can result in mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is characterized by intrusive trauma memories and severe stress responses with devastating personal and societal consequences. Current treatments teach patients to regulate trauma memories, but many experience a return of symptoms even after initially successful treatment. Neuroscience is discovering ways to permanently modify trauma memories and prevent the return of symptoms. Such memory modification techniques (MMTs) have great clinical potential but also important ethical, legal and social implications. In this article, the authors describe PTSD, the role of memory in PTSD, its effects on the brain, and the limitations of current treatment methods. Then, the state of the art of the neuroscience of MMTs is presented. Within this realistic scientific framework the authors will discuss the ethical, legal and social implications of MMTs for the treatment of war-induced PTSD, especially in a military population. Three major sets of issues will be focused on: safety and social justice concerns, concerns about threats to authenticity and identity, and the possible legal and moral duties to retain certain memories. Finally, the article concludes that within scientific reality, concerns are limited and do not outweigh the potential benefits of developing treatments for patients.

While the dominant human rights discourse on transitional justice constitutes a mix of reinforcing aims that seek to “make peace with” a violent past, this article complicates this notion by exploring how affective memories can prevent individuals from envisioning a future for themselves in which their individual and their nation's past is safely left behind. In the context of ongoing debates over whether to remember or forget a country's traumatic past, the article will show how affective memories of violence and disappearance prevail and disrupt the reconciliation paradigm, and need to be taken into account in transitional justice processes.

Transitional justice is a conspicuous feature of responses to mass atrocities. Rooted in accountability and redress for victims, transitional justice mechanisms influence and are influenced by collective memory of conflicts. This article looks at the dynamics between memory, trauma and forgiveness in Cambodia. Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodians expressed limited knowledge of the past, a strong desire for the truth, and lingering feelings of hatred. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) created or renewed demand for truth, along with some desire for harm to come to the wrongdoers. Although the ECCC was set up several decades after the mass atrocities, the data suggest that the ECCC and the civil society movement associated with it may have had positive outcomes on addressing the legacy of the violence.

More than ten years after the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its Final Report, there has been no implementation of the recommendations proffered. This article focuses on post-conflict memorialization, the TRC's strategy to engender collective remembering, and a set of State-led actions designed to teach future generations about the past violence with a view to preventing relapse into violent conflict. Both the constructive and destructive patterns of remembering that have evolved in the wake of the government's silence since the release of the recommendations will be analyzed.

The construction of historical memory is closely linked to the guarantees provided by the right to freedom of expression. This right ensures that victims and society in general are able to speak about the past, narrate their own stories, and call for and influence social discussion and institutional reform. Mechanisms such as access to State archives, participation in the media, journalistic coverage of armed conflicts and the free flow of stories, artistic endeavours, criticisms and condemnations empower victims and the rest of society in the construction of alternative narratives and independent memories. This article examines case law of the Inter-American System of Human Rights that elaborates on freedom of expression, and considers its importance for the construction of historical memory. It also touches upon some decisions taken by the Colombian high courts, relevant to a context in which mechanisms of transitional justice have recently been implemented.

Presidents of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) occupy a special position: they are not only direct witnesses to the march of history, but they also participate in it given their prominent role in the humanitarian sphere. This dual status becomes particularly salient when they write about the organization they run. By reviewing the published writings of ICRC presidents, this article analyzes how these individuals combine their personal experience with the organization's history, and the role this history plays in their writing.

This Opinion Note is a reflection on the challenges faced by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in emerging countries that want to be heard in the humanitarian world without being major donors. The author underlines the importance of the feeling of humiliation that can be seen in the narratives of these countries. After listing some of the specific activities that can be developed in such contexts, he refers to the concept of strategic anchoring developed by the ICRC in order to work more effectively in a world that is becoming increasingly multipolar.

Inter-State wars seem to have come to an end in the late 1990s; ever since, the global reality of collective violence has come down to the chaos of contemporary civil wars and terrorist attacks. In this article, it will be argued that in today's civil wars, as well as in terrorist violence, the traditional warrior ethos is fading, giving way to types of violence governed by a new psychological and social paradigm. In other words, it is assumed that the very set of values that has universally determined the male gender role and the frame of hegemonic masculinity since time immemorial has also informed the waging of war according to a “heroic regime of violence”, and this phenomenon has made war a desirable option for countless generations of young men. On the other hand, the global changes entailed by modernity seem to have undermined this warrior ethos, giving way to a “post-heroic regime” in which extermination-oriented violence, rather than combat-oriented violence, is fostered. In this article, the author will scrutinize the founding psychological and social determinants that have so far upheld the cultural construct of the heroic model, in order to illuminate the ominous consequences of the deculturation of war in today's chaotic conflicts. In such contexts, the men who are fighting1 suffer from a loss of meaning and the impossibility of gaining dignity and social recognition in an ecosystem of humiliation and ubiquitous violence that has little to do with the expectations of pride and dignity conveyed by the past ideals of heroism associated with a certain vision of masculinity. The article will also discuss ways and means of getting the message of international humanitarian law through to men on the front lines caught up in such circumstances.

Remembrance of war and conflict exposes the intricate interweaving of cultural memory and identity. Nations commemorate war to link narratives of the past with the present. This linking creates shared national narratives that temporally reinforce identities across the geography of the nation and among diverse citizenry. In this paper, the authors turn their attention towards the experiential and place-based concerns of the politics of memory within the context of war. It is argued that through attentiveness to individual experience we can better understand how cultural memory is enveloped into constructions of identity and critique such constructions alongside official narratives.

This article draws on my book Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage,1 which incorporates ground-breaking fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina and extensive research, and on my subsequent research and fieldwork in the post-conflict country. In the article, I explore the meaning that restoration and reconstruction of cultural heritage intentionally destroyed during conflict can have, particularly to the forcibly displaced. With the protection of cultural heritage increasingly being treated as an important human right and with the impact that forcible displacement during armed conflict has on cultural identity now in the spotlight, the importance of cultural heritage for those ethnically cleansed in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992–95 war (both those who returned and those who did not) has relevance for considerations of contemporary post-conflict populations.

Between the inauguration of the Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in 1956 in Paris and the opening of the Shoah Memorial in Drancy in 2012, the narration of the Shoah in France has evolved through the use of archives, discussions, commemorations and exhibitions. In the immediate post-war period, a small group of people worked on the construction of a dedicated place to document the genocide of Jews in Europe in order to ensure that the memory of the Shoah would be impregnated into the collective consciousness. This project, which later evolved into the Paris and Drancy Shoah Memorials, could be seen as an expression of what remembrance is in France today.

Nowadays, there exists an international movement towards the extensive recognition as cultural heritage, or “heritagization”, of areas where wars, genocides and massacres have taken place. The phenomenon of “seeing” mass death, called “dark tourism” or the “tourism of desolation”, has become both an aim and a destination for visitors. The article examines this heritagization, with an emphasis on the memorials of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi of Rwanda.

As a general matter, international humanitarian law is up to the task of providing the legal framework for cyber operations during an armed conflict. However, two debates persist in this regard, the resolution of which will determine the precise degree of protection the civilian population will enjoy during cyber operations. The first revolves around the meaning of the term “attack” in various conduct of hostilities rules, while the second addresses the issue of whether data may be considered an object such that operations destroying or altering it are subject to the prohibition on attacking civilian objects and that their effects need be considered when considering proportionality and the taking of precautions in attack. Even if these debates were to be resolved, the civilian population would still face risks from the unique capabilities of cyber operations. This article proposes two policies that parties to a conflict should consider adopting in order to ameliorate such risks. They are both based on the premise that military operations must reflect a balance between military concerns and the interest of States in prevailing in the conflict.

States party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I of 1977 have an obligation to take measures necessary to suppress all acts contrary to their provisions. Moreover, States must investigate war crimes allegedly committed by their nationals or on their territory, and other war crimes over which they have jurisdiction, such as on the basis of universal jurisdiction, and, if appropriate, prosecute the suspects. In accordance with these obligations and the limits they impose, States may adopt certain measures during and in the aftermath of armed conflicts to promote reconciliation and peace, one of which is amnesties. International humanitarian law (IHL) contains rules pertaining to the granting and scope of amnesties. Specifically, Article 6(5) of Protocol II additional to the Geneva Conventions relating to non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) provides that, at the end of hostilities, the authorities in power shall endeavour to grant the broadest possible amnesty to persons who have participated in the armed conflict, or those deprived of their liberty for reasons related to the armed conflict. Importantly, under customary IHL (as identified in Rule 159 of the ICRC customary IHL study), this excludes persons suspected of, accused of, or sentenced for war crimes in NIACs.

The biannual update on national legislation and case law is a tool to promote the exchange of information on national measures for the implementation of international humanitarian law (IHL).