Time Elapsed: Untangling Commemorative Temporalities after Conflict and Tragedy

The time that elapses between a conflict or a traumatic event and its memorialization can vary enormously depending on a range of social, economic, and political circumstances. While the nuances of commemorative temporalities are not always amenable to ready synthesis due to the plethora of motivations involved in acts of remembrance, this paper marks an attempt to untangle some of the themes which have emerged from an analysis of the relationship between memorialization and time. Conceptualizing ‘time elapsed’ as a potentially important perspective in the study of memory and conflict, this paper has three intersecting objectives. First, it teases out some of the factors that may influence time elapsed; second, it questions whether the time it takes to memorialize traumatic events is lessening as society become more attuned to a ‘memorial vocabulary’; and finally, it determines the extent to which a ‘memory-boom’ is responsible for the recovery of tragedies seemingly forgotten.