Remembering and forgetting war
How do civilians, organisations, and militaries, make and use the memory of war in the digital/AI era?
How does participative warfare shape memory, accountability and justice?
Platforms and apps differ markedly in what can be downloaded and archived and analysed and remembered. This research strand interrogates how digital technologies enable or disable individuals, organisations, groups or whoever, to encode memories in the first place, which determines what will ultimately be even possible to see again, to re-represent, to remember.
To do this I develop my concept of strategic memory which is the encoding of experience so that it may be retained, accessed and used to achieve certain goals in the future.
Uses of strategic memory in military as well as other organisational domains include, the maintaining of group identity and resilience, learning lessons and thereby helping to prevent repetition of mistakes, and ensuring accountability for decisions and acts, and so underpinning political operational legitimacy.
Traditionally, the nature of the past’s relevance to strategy for the future were based on a memory of warfare... But in the twenty-first century, it is important to shift this focus to recognise the role of memory in war.
To grasp strategic memory this work will show how memory systems together shape and strengthen the potential for goals to be accomplished in the future. Yet, at the same time, through their same interconnectedness and interreliance, such systems also subject the past — and the future — to considerable vulnerabilities, such as blockage, loss and dysfunction — new forms of forgetting.
