ABSTRACT
This chapter examines key currents and developments in memory studies and transitional justice, from the Cambodian context. It outlines key debates within transitional justice, a field of scholarship and practice that is predicated on an interwoven set of normative, technical and ideological claims over what memory is and what must be done with it in the wake of atrocities and suffering. A review of work on a social 'mechanics' of memory is obliged to start with Maurice Halbwachs' seminal work on the 'collective memory'. The reproduction of memory, according to 'dynamic' accounts, is therefore a practical process. More recently, the proliferation of memorial sites and spaces that has marked the 'memory boom' over recent decades has been characterised by a more diverse range of memorial practices, identifying critically self-reflexive 'counter'-memorials, and even calls for forgetting, or 'anti'-memorials. Specific spaces or sites of memory tend be bound to and licensed by wider systems of social and political regulation.
