Make history great again! The emergence of a new paradigm of memory politics in International Relations

This article introduces Conspiratorial Memory (ConMem) as a new paradigm of memory politics in contemporary International Relations. Building on the research on nationally oriented heroic memory regimes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Nationalist Memory (NatMem)) and the victim-centered, Cosmopolitanized Memory (CosMem) culture that emerged after the Cold War, we argue that the 2020s have witnessed the rise of a hybrid formation that fuses global repertoires of trauma and rights with nationalist triumphalism. ConMem reframes cosmopolitan norms as selectively applied, externally manipulated, or hostile to national sovereignty, even as it hijacks the cosmopolitanized human-rights-based memory regime and its infrastructures by reappropriating core moral vocabularies—victimhood, rights, and historical justice—for exclusionary or illiberal agendas. Its defining feature is a conspiratorial interpretive logic that reads past atrocities and present geopolitical conflicts through narratives of hidden intent, external orchestration, and enemy action, enabling a strategic toggling between victimhood and heroic agency. Conceptually, we develop a tripartite ideal-typology—NatMem, CosMem, and ConMem—to historicize shifts in memory politics across geopolitical epochs. Empirically, we demonstrate ConMem’s explanatory power through analysis of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs discourse (2020–2025), showing how genocide claims, World War II narratives, and conspiratorial reasoning are combined to legitimize foreign policy. While amplified in authoritarian settings, ConMem’s central logics are increasingly visible in democracies that are still considered free (e.g. United States, Israel, Italy), but noted for their increasingly illiberal tendencies and backsliding.