Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict

This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today’s Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe.

This book proposes a new notion of “ambicoloniality” to speak about the current situation when Ukraine has become Russia's territory of obsession, and Russia, in its desire to occupy Ukraine, has in effect subjected itself to Ukraine’s symbolic dominance. Ambicoloniality presents a key point of divergence from already existing models. The mutual impact of the two countries over centuries has gone both ways, over a shared border—in contrast to many other empires that established their colonial power relations at a distance. The Ukrainian-Russian case is different from the examples covered by both postcolonial and decolonial theorists. To explore the reasons and consequences of such a differing process of colonial expansion, anti-colonial struggle, and decolonial release, the book inquires into the historical and cultural reasons for the emerging gap between the two states. It examines the role that cultural hybridity plays in political self-identification in both Ukraine and Russia, and how this hybridity has manifested in society and culture (including examples of art and literature) following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, until 2023.