From the Ashes of History : Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics

"In recent years, calls for reparations and restorative justice, alongside the rise of populist grievance politics, have demonstrated the stubborn resilience of traumatic memory. From the transnational Black Lives Matter movement's calls for reckoning with the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, to continued efforts to secure recognition of the Armenian genocide or Imperial Japan's human rights abuses, international politics is replete with examples of past violence reasserting itself in the present. But how should scholars understand trauma's long-term impacts? Why do some traumas lie dormant for generations, only to surface anew in pivotal moments? And how does trauma scale from individuals to larger political groupings like nations and states, shaping political identities, grievances, and policymaking? In From the Ashes of History, Adam B. Lerner looks at collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics--a "shock" to political cultures that can constitute new actors and shape decision-making over the long-term. As Lerner shows, uncovering collective trauma's role in international politics is vital for two key reasons. First, it can help explain longstanding tensions between groups--an especially relevant topic as scholars examine the transnational resurgence of nationalism and populism. Second, it pushes the discipline of International Relations to more completely account for mass violence's true long-term costs, particularly as they become embedded in longstanding structural inequalities and injustices. While IR scholarship has largely dismissed non-systematic, latent phenomena like trauma, Lerner argues that collective trauma can help draw the lines between international political groups and frame the logics of international political action. Drawing on three historical cases that uncover the impact of collective trauma in Indian, Israeli, and American foreign policymaking, From the Ashes of History demonstrates the broad utility of collective trauma as a theoretical lens for investigating how mass violence's legacy can resurge and dissipate over time."--Publisher's website In recent years, calls for reparations and restorative justice, alongside the rise of populist grievance politics, have demonstrated the stubborn resilience of traumatic memory. From the transnational Black Lives Matter movement's calls for reckoning with the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, to continued efforts to secure recognition of the Armenian genocide or Imperial Japan's human rights abuses, international politics is replete with examples of past violence reasserting itself in the present. But how should scholars understand trauma's long-term impacts? Why do some traumas lie dormant for generations, only to surface anew in pivotal moments? And how does trauma scale from individuals to larger political groupings like nations and states, shaping political identities, grievances, and policymaking?In From the Ashes of History, Adam B. Lerner looks at collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics--a "shock" to political cultures that can constitute new actors and shape decision-making over the long-term. As Lerner shows, uncovering collective trauma's role in international politics is vital for two key reasons. First, it can help explain longstanding tensions between groups--an especially relevant topic as scholars examine the transnational resurgence of nationalism and populism. Second, it pushes the discipline of International Relations to more completely account for mass violence's true long-term costs, particularly as they become embedded in longstanding structural inequalities and injustices. While IR scholarship has largely dismissed non-systematic, latent phenomena like trauma, Lerner argues that collective trauma can help draw the lines between international political groups and frame the logics of international political action. Drawing on three historical cases that uncover the impact of collective trauma in Indian, Israeli, and American foreign policymaking, From the Ashes of History demonstrates the broad utility of collective trauma as a theoretical lens for investigating how mass violence's legacy can resurge and dissipate over time. This book theorizes collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics—a shock to political cultures that can both make and break international institutions. Though scholars of international relations and related disciplines have historically paid outsize attention to the onset of mass violence, as well as the changes it causes in the balance of power or security calculations, far less attention has been paid to its indirect longer-term impacts, particularly as they manifest as collective trauma. This book argues that collective trauma can not only shape the divisions between “us” and “them” that constitute the international system but also frame logics of interaction over the course of generations. The first half of the book develops a theoretical framework for understanding collective trauma as an emergent phenomenon, outlining both how it translates from individual to social (and vice versa) and how it interacts with diverse political conditions and competing priorities. The second half turns to three historical cases examining colonialism as collective trauma in post-independence India, the Holocaust’s constitutive role in Israeli foreign policy imaginaries, and the influence of the post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis on the US global war on terror. Taken together, these cases demonstrate collective trauma’s foundational role in international politics, as well as the larger potential benefits of a “trauma turn” for the international relations discipline. This reorientation, the book demonstrates, is particularly vital as scholars work to combat the discipline’s Western bias and better account for the legacy of structural injustice and oppression. In 'From the Ashes of History', Adam B. Lerner looks at collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics - a 'shock' to political cultures that can constitute new actors and shape decision-making over the long-term. While international relations scholarship has largely dismissed non-systematic, latent phenomena like trauma, Lerner argues that collective trauma can help draw the lines between international political groups and frame the logics of international political action