To explain why Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this article foregrounds a crucial but understudied dimension: national memory. It argues that both discontinuity in national memory and dislocation between national memory and territory threaten states’ ontological security. The Soviet collapse marked a profound break in Russia’s national memory. To restore the ontological security thus shattered, Russia’s ruling elite adopted a narrative of radical continuity of Russian statehood, linking Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation into an unbroken thousand-year tradition. Yet by placing its origins in independent Ukraine, this narrative was inherently precarious. While mending the discontinuity in national memory, it produced a dislocation between memory and territory, rendering Russia ontologically vulnerable. By asserting their own claim to Kyiv as the birthplace of Ukrainian nation- and statehood, Ukraine’s ruling elite exposed this dislocation and laid bare both the precarity of the radical continuity narrative and Russia’s resulting ontological vulnerability. The Kremlin’s response was to seek political – and, when that failed, military – control over Ukraine to redress this dislocation and eliminate the sources of ontological vulnerability that flowed from the radical continuity narrative.

This study focuses on a unique Facebook group: ‘Cyprus Immigrants Organisation’, whose members are mostly refugees who were once held in camps in Cyprus in the late 1940s and their descendants. The study offers a content analysis of 687 posts and comments published by group members during 2022. It reveals how a Facebook group made possible, produced, and promoted narratives of a topic that receives relatively little attention in the literature, media, and other memory spaces. The study highlights the range of memory-related content and activities within a Facebook group. We found three main activities of memory work within the group: (a) Members try to shape a coherent narrative of the events; (b) Members discuss acts of remembrance, suggesting additional activities and sharing personal initiatives; (c) Members aim to emphasise their personal connection and belonging to the Cyprus exiles’ community by sharing photographs, artwork, and documents. These memory practices, alongside processes such as gathering knowledge, sharing memories, shaping narratives, and commemorating, highlight the uniqueness of a Facebook group as a platform for memory. These kinds of activities would not be possible on such a scale without the digital environment or, more specifically, a Facebook group. With numerous narratives and collaborative knowledge gathering, the group exemplifies a democratised process of multi-generational memory work and narrative construction.

This article examines the Italian translations and reception of Winston S. Churchill’s The Second World War, using British and Italian archival materials and press sources. It shows how the Italian editions and serialisations introduced constant modifications – abridgements, omissions, textual cuts, and paratextual framing – in order to adapt the memoirs for a national audience. These interventions softened Churchill’s judgments on Italy, emphasised the ideological character of the war, and strengthened anti-Soviet themes, thus aligning the text with dominant cultural and political discourses of the postwar years. Analysis of contemporary reviews and newspaper debates highlights a polarised reception: critical distance or silence in intellectual journals contrasted with enthusiastic praise in mainstream dailies, where the memoirs were hailed as both literary achievement and democratic statement. The article argues that these editorial and translational strategies played a crucial role in integrating Churchill’s narrative into Italian collective memory, supporting a symbolic redefinition of Italy’s place from defeated nation to one of the victors.

This article examines the construction of gendered collective identity among leftist women in Turkey through their post-1980 coup prison memory. By analyzing 124 autobiographical narratives, we uncover a process of identity formation grounded in a continuous negotiation between past struggles and present concerns, constituting a counternarrative that challenges the master narrative of defeat and submission prevalent after the coup. The article’s tripartite framework of distance, substance, and persistence underscores women’s journey from marginalization to collective empowerment, producing shifting subject positions across time. By placing temporality at the center of collective identity formation, this study contributes to feminist memory literature and identity studies while addressing a significant historiographical gap by bringing the neglected struggles of leftist women in Turkey to light.

How do institutionalized memories of historical trauma shape contemporary political attitudes? This study examines how emotionally evocative reminders of past violence influence public opinion. Drawing on a survey experiment in South Korea, I test how symbolic narratives of Japanese colonial repression affect emotional responses and downstream political views. The results show that while these reminders evoke strong emotions—especially anger and fear—they do not directly alter attitudes toward national identity or policy. Instead, anger, more than fear, consistently predicts both inclusive orientations, such as increased national pride, and exclusive preferences, including support for protectionist policies. These findings suggest that historical trauma influences political behavior not by providing new information but by activating internalized emotional frameworks. The study contributes to research on the legacy of political violence by identifying discrete emotions as key mechanisms linking collective victimhood to divergent political responses.

This article examines the Portuguese maritime epic through the discourses of gatekeepers, particularly members of the Portuguese parliament. The study positions the maritime epic as a crucial element of Portuguese identity and self-esteem, central to an ongoing culture war over the past and the contestation of official narratives. The analysis reveals that, while the maritime epic serves as a ‘lieu de mémoire’ for collective memory, it is increasingly contested by decolonial movements and actors. The findings indicate (i) a left–right polarisation and (ii) a more nuanced, depolarised stance among mainstream political actors, characterised by two distinct approaches: a voluntarist perspective, advocating for revising the narrative, and an antivoluntarist stance, expressing caution regarding the terms of the debate.

Given the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create human clones, it is not surprising that chatbots have been implemented in politics. In a turbulent political context, these AI-driven bots are likely to be used to spread biased information, amplify polarisation, and distort our memories. Large language models (LLMs) lack ‘political memory’ and cannot accurately process political discourses that draw from collective political memory. We refer to research concerning collective political memory and AI to present our observations of a chatbot experiment undertaken during the Presidential Elections in Finland in early 2024. This election took place at a historically crucial moment, as Finland, traditionally an advocate of neutrality and peacefulness, had become a vocal supporter of Ukraine and a new member state of NATO. Our research team developed LLM-driven chatbots for all presidential candidates, and Finnish citizens were afforded the chance to engage with these chatbot–politicians. In our study, human–chatbot discussions related to foreign and security politics were especially interesting. While rhetorically very typical and believable in light of real political speech, chatbots reorganised prevailing discourses generating responses that distorted the collective political memory. In actuality, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had drastically changed Finland’s political positioning. Our AI-driven chatbots, or ‘electobots’, continued to promote constructive dialogue with Russia, thus earning our moniker ‘Finlandised Bots’. Our experiment highlights that training AI for political purposes requires familiarity with the prevailing discourses and attunement to the nuances of the context, showcasing the importance of studying human–machine interactions beyond the typical viewpoint of disinformation.

In post-imperial European states, debates about imperial legacies – centred on issues such as colonial statues, police treatment of minorities, and school curricula – have intensified in recent years. Yet little systematic research examines public attitudes towards empire or their political impact. We develop a framework linking imperial nostalgia with political preferences and present findings from Britain using a national survey and conjoint experiment. First, we identify a distinct public opinion dimension on empire, ranging from nostalgic to critical. Second, we show that imperial nostalgia strongly predicts party evaluations and vote intentions, with effects comparable to those of immigration attitudes and left–right economic values. Finally, a conjoint experiment reveals that elite positions on empire influence voter preferences, but do so asymmetrically: right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support. These findings underscore the contemporary political relevance of imperial nostalgia in post-imperial Europe.

What is the effect of exposure to contested commemorations? Previous research has mostly found that removing these objects generates backlash. However, I argue that non-intervention can itself have detrimental effects as citizens are exposed to them in their daily lives. Empirically, I leverage a survey experiment where the treatment is administered via an originally created video that resembles a tour guide of an American city. With minimal manipulations, respondents in the treatment group are exposed to Confederate commemorations, while those in the control group are not. I find that these symbols signal the town’s history and predominant ideology. They also negatively shape observers’ emotions, political efficacy, trust in the town residents, and donations to local schools. The effects are moderated by partisanship. Republican respondents are either unaffected by the treatment or move in the opposite direction. These results highlight the potential negative consequences of maintaining controversial commemorations.

Can monuments to victims of authoritarian regimes promote more tolerant societies? We look into the case of Stolpersteine, small memorials commemorating victims of the Nazi regime in Germany. Unlike other monuments, Stolpersteine are dedicated to specific individuals who were victims of Nazi violence. In a pre-registered survey experiment, we showed treated individuals pictures of the stones. Our results show that exposure to Stolpersteine strongly increased negative emotions and reduced positive ones. The results on attitudinal and quasi-behavioral outcomes are mixed, likely driven by ceiling effects. We find a positive effect on tolerance toward the only minority group that faces low tolerance in the control group. However, there is no statistically significant effect for other groups.

The main objective of this article is to examine history textbooks as sites of discursive contestation regarding the treatment of the 1986 Jeltoqsan protests, a pivotal moment in post-independence Kazakhstani collective memory. This research analyzes the multilayered and inter-discursive domains of Jeltoqsan across the History of Kazakhstan textbooks published between 1992 and 2024. It focuses on four key contested themes between official narratives and those of protest mourners and sufferers: the portrayal of Dinmukhamed Qonaev, whose dismissal sparked the protests; the role of former President Nursultan Nazarbaev in handling the aftermath; the framing of Jeltoqsan as either an ordinary event or an uprising for significant political change; and ethnic or non-ethnic dimension of the protests. The findings reveal discursive competition and conflict in articulating the official and protestor narratives.

This article explores the transformational potential of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (genAI) – large language models (LLMs), chatbots, and AI-driven smart assistants yet to emerge – to reshape human cognition, memory, and creativity. First, the paper investigates the potential of genAI tools to enable a new form of human-computer co-remembering, based on prompting rather than traditional recollection. Second, it examines the individual, cultural, and social implications of co-creating with genAI for human creativity. These phenomena are explored through the concept of Homo Promptus, a figure whose cognitive processes are shaped by engagement with AI. Two speculative scenarios illustrate these dynamics. The first, ‘prompting to remember’, analyses genAI tools as cognitive extensions that offload memory work to machines. The second scenario, ‘prompting to create’, explores changes in creativity when performing together with genAI tools as co-creators. By mobilising concepts from cognitive psychology, media and memory studies, together with Huizinga’s exploration of play, and Rancière’s intellectual emancipation, this study argues that genAI tools are not only reshaping how humans remember and create but also redefining cultural and social norms. It concludes by calling for ‘critical’ engagement with the societal and intellectual implications of AI, advocating for research that fosters adaptive and independent (meta)cognitive practices to reconcile digital innovation with human agency.