“Best Practices” of Global Memory and the Politics of Atonement in Lebanon

In Lebanon, Haugbolle argues, the state has left the task of addressing difficult questions about mass violence in the recent past to cultural producers. While the impulse for truth telling and memory work evolved out of domestic debates, the logic and institutional design of the resulting cultural memory industry have been strongly influenced by Western models. European cultural centers act as platforms for activities related to the memory of the civil war, and individual activists with transnational or foreign biographical backgrounds are influenced by French or German debates, implying that there are “best practices” of global memory that can be applied to Lebanon. Haugbolle shows that this has resulted in accusations of elitism and in a substitution of cultural production for real political accountability.