Three and a half years after Russia invaded Ukraine, there are few immediate signs of a cessation to the ongoing hostilities. Yet amid the steady toll of front-line fighting and near-daily Russian airstrikes, Ukrainians are already considering how to remember the tens of thousands of lives lost over the course of this conflict.
A spontaneous memorial of flags and photographs already exists and grows daily, having first sprung up in 2022 in Kyiv’s Independence Square. Now, government and civil society groups have begun conversations on how such acts of commemoration can be made more permanent through monuments and memorials across the country.
As a scholar of public memory and how societies remember large-scale violence and mass atrocities, I study and support the work of governments and organizations developing memory sites around the world. As Ukraine negotiates its own related challenges, lessons from research on how memorials have changed and the role they can play in post-violence societies can help guide these processes.
