Interventions

International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This book explores the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Our world is imbued with the politics of memory and of memorialization, everywhere we go we are inundated with a virtual memory industry. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, Auchter explores how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. She draws on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction that sustains particular performances of statecraft. The state is often seen as an actor that intervenes in memorialization, and memorial projects either support the state narrative or resist it. Auchter seeks to complicate this by exploring the contestation inherent at memorial sites. It is a journey through sites of memory that looks both for the traces of statecraft in the way certain lives and deaths are rendered visible within a larger narrative of memorialization and for the traces of ghosts that might disrupt the privileging of certain lives. Auchter focuses on two key features of memorial sites to explore this tension: corporeality, or specifically the role of dead bodies, and the construction of particular spaces as the appropriate sites for memorialization, in the context of three cases: the Rwandan Genocide, 9/11 and US-Mexico Border memorials. The three cases offer up a comprehensive way of assessing the idea of haunting, precisely because they tell different stories about how statecraft works in different contexts. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, security studies, statecraft and memory studies.