Time elapsed: untangling commemorative tragedies after conflict and tragedy

The time that elapses between a conflict or a traumatic event and its memorialisation 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 memorialisation and time. Conceptualising ‘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 memorialise 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.