International Relations

"Perceptions of the past play a vital role in shaping the contemporary world. Memory, Trauma and World Politics brings together leading scholars from across the social sciences to investigate the varied and complex ways in which social memories of traumatic events, including war, genocide and political oppression, inform and construct individual and collective identities. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, they analyse issues including the possibilities for post-conflict reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, and the former Yugoslavia, the function of memory and forgetting in the evolution of the modern state, the relationship between trauma and ressentiment, the role of the Holocaust in shaping both German and Israeli political culture, of apartheid in current South African politics, and of 9/11 in the new world order. Theoretically innovative and thematically wide-ranging, Memory, Trauma and World Politics addresses some of the most pressing issues facing analysts of world politics today.

"This collection, unusually integrated for an edited volume, treats questions of memory and trauma in world politics in a critical, interdisciplinary fashion. The range of conceptual and empirical material offered is both novel and rich, and specialists and students alike will benefit greatly from its scholarship." - Professor David Campbell, Durham University, UK

"The contributors to Memory, Trauma and World Politics present exciting, innovative work by introducing concepts of social and cultural trauma into the study of national and transnational politics. The volume represents an impressive diversity of methods and opinions and serves as an excellent guide to the field of collective memory and trauma studies."
- Wulf Kansteiner, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University, USA

"Memory, Trauma and World Politics is a fascinating and long overdue study of memory as a multidisciplinary phenomenon...a theoretically rich and imaginative volume that thoughtfully and convincingly navigates the reader through the multiple ways in which memory is proven to be indispensable for the understanding of modern politics." - Alla Mirzoyan, Political Studies Review "

"This paper will criticize the current characterization of customary international law analysis as falling into two competing analytical methods, specifically, the “traditional” and “modern” methods.

Following Koskennieni, Roberts, Wouters, Ryngaert, and others, contemporary customary international legal analysis is said to have divided into two schools: the traditional and modern. These schools are supposed to reflect the use of the inductive and deductive methods, respectively, and, in turn, to either apologize for the freedom of state action or establish a utopia where the freedom of the state is limited.

This image of struggle between competing methods, however, does not fully capture the ways in which the inductive and deductive methods are actually intertwined in customary international law analysis. The methods are not two opposing monolithic techniques. Instead, in practice, the methods are intermixed, combining a variety of choices. Deductive steps are taken regarding the use of induction, inductive steps are taken in reaching patterns from practice, deductive steps are taken in identifying sample pools, and so on. This paper concludes that induction and deduction are both used in parallel in most analyses of customary international law in a delicate, yet valuable, balance of corrective tension. Furthermore, this situation is neither traditional, nor modern – in a chronological sense – but is consistent throughout the history of customary international law analysis.

Following an introductory section reviewing the background to the debate over approaches, the paper will consider deduction and induction in more detail, attempting to understand these two methods of logical reasoning. Then the author will examine the way customary international law is analyzed by international tribunals by deconstructing the analytical process into smaller logical steps. For each step, an analysis will be undertaken of whether the conclusion is reached through induction or deduction, and whether this approach is consistent across tribunals and historical eras. Through this approach, the paper will take a first step to suggest the complex ways inductive and deductive analyses are layered in the assessment of customary international law."