Post-conflict heritage: symbolic healing and cultural renewal

Heritage is invoked for post-conflict development by international organisations, governments, and sub-national groups to provide emotional and cultural, including economic, healing for individuals and societies. However, academic critiques of healing-heritage typically cite the failure of heritage to heal, either because it cannot, or because it is managed incorrectly. Thus, an anomalous situation exists between expectations and critiques, which this study describes and explores through international policies and national and sub-national post-conflict healing-heritage initiatives from Rwanda and Uganda. Drawing on concepts of heritage as a cultural process, cultural trauma, and symbolic healing, this study proposes that heritage is neither an essentially positive nor negative post-conflict development strategy to select or avoid respectively. Instead, heritage is better understood as a common element of post-conflict renewal, which becomes intensified as the past is aggressively negotiated to provide healing related to conflict traumas. By moving beyond the ‘does heritage heal or hurt?’ distraction the meaning and function of heritage in post-conflict contexts as a common element of post-conflict healing complexes is elucidated. The implication for those who wish to manage post-conflict development through heritage is that they are just the latest in a long history of symbolic healers, from whom they have a lot to learn.