The Political Struggle Over Historical Memory: State Hegemony versus the Territorialization of Archives

Abstract

This article examines places of memory as mechanisms of political contestation in transitional justice contexts, with focus on Colombia. Memory operates not as preservation of the past but as a site of struggle over interpretive authority and political legitimacy. Historical acceleration does not produce uniform temporal experience; in contexts of state violence, the past remains directly constitutive of present conditions. Historical memory operates across three analytical dimensions—material, functional, and symbolic—yet institutional frameworks that reduce memory to territorial fixity exclude ephemeral practices that generate political efficacy through ritual repetition. The central argument is that memory constitutes a mechanism through which marginalized groups exercise political agency by producing alternative historical intelligibility that contest state monopolies on narrative interpretation. This contestation reshapes victims' status: from those to whom violence occurred toward those whose interpretations shape collective understanding. Recognition of contested territorial memories operates as a necessary condition for democratic stability and guarantees of non-repetition, contingent upon whether institutions incorporate victim narratives as valid historical claims and whether victims exercise interpretive authority. Memory proliferation in public discourse expresses emergent subaltern political subjectivities rather than institutional instability.