ABSTRACT
Stemming from its central staging in contemporary global risk society and post-conflict environments and international affairs on the one hand, and adopting a weak constructionist perspective on the other, cultural trauma is construed in this chapter as a retroactive societal meaning-making process initiated by ruptures of the social fabric. These ruptures are usually caused by damaging events like wars, genocides, famines, terrorist attacks, environmental disasters, economic crises, forced migration etc. As a trauma drama, this process involves three pivotal factors: (a) individual, group, and group-based emotions, (b) controversial policies and politics of memory, and (c) the formation of personal and collective identities. Cultural traumas are publicly narrated collective experiences of past horrendous events by antagonistic carrier groups with regards to the nature of the traumatogenic event and the identification of victims and perpetrators. As such they raise normative claims for the possible remedy since they may either break or restore the sense of political and moral community.
