Rewriting the Past, Shaping the Present: Memory, Power, and Global Order in International Relations

The panel explores the role of historical memory in informing collective identity, state behaviour, and the international order within the International Relations scholarship. Following Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, memory is here understood as a socially constructed phenomenon and an ongoing political process, continually reinterpreted and mediated.
The panel is informed by recent developments in memory studies, particularly the understanding of memory as processual - that is, as an ongoing, evolving phenomenon shaped by the context in which it is recalled and reinterpreted. Memory is seen not as a fixed record of the past but as a contested resource that political actors strategically employ to construct narratives about the present and the future. This approach recognises memory’s unpredictability and its capacity to be reshaped in response to states’ agendas and interests.
The papers presented in this panel investigate how historical memory is instrumentalised to shape state behaviour and (re)construct the international order:
- The World Bank’s historical engagement with poverty traces the evolution of institutional memory and its role in shaping the WB’s approach to development and lending in the Global South.
- U.S. narratives of military withdrawals from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan illustrate how historical memories of previous wars are reinterpreted in attempts to maintain ontological security and justify the U.S.’s active role in world politics.
- China’s use of deceptive narratives about Xinjiang is explored through the lens of restorative disinformation, where manipulated memories are employed to address crises of meaning and maintain internal stability, emphasising memory’s function as a security mechanism.
- Japan’s nuclear victimhood highlights how the victimhood relating to nuclear technology paradoxically contributed to the emergence of nuclearism and the global nuclear order, revealing the co-constitutive role of memory and nuclear technology in the order-making process
- China and Indonesia’s attempt to establish the Conference of the New Emerging Forces illustrates how memory of exclusion motivated efforts to create an alternative order, with lasting implications for international institution-building.
- Diverging postcolonial narratives in South Korea and Taiwan on Japan's imperial legacy demonstrate how memory is actively reshaped by local political actors, leading to contrasting perspectives of animosity and sympathy that continue to shape East Asia’s regional relations.