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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the winter of 2022 is a phenomena since dominated media news and public debate since then. The long term, economic and political, consequences of the invasion should be very difficult to predict from a present day perspective. However, severe psychological and social traumas, for many generations, probably will be the unevitable heritage. What parallels in European history could be related to? One purpose of our course is to understand and explain the mechanisms trigging phenomena like interstate conflicts, civil war and genocide, but even more to discuss how to work through those experiences. In 2003, the Swedish government established a special agency called Living History Forum. The original purpose was to disseminate knowledge of the circumstances of the Holocaust, and later other instances of genocide have been included as well. The agency has had an explicit normative aim, and its purpose has been to promote tolerance, diversity, and democracy, in some sense through learning from the past. Our course takes a step further, as mentioned above put the emphasize on the working through processes, which could be seen as a sort of social therapy. Since the Holocaust has arguably been a privileged object of analysis for a long time, the course will not focus specifically on this particular topic, even though Holocaust memories in post-war Germany are treated. The course sheds light on certain other, not yet thoroughly processed traumas, such as Finland after the civil war in 1918, Bosnia after the Balkan wars in the 1990s, post apartheid South Africa and Spain after Franco. In a more general sense, the course also touches upon questions of collective memory production, ideology, and identity. References to the war in Ukraine will be frequent.

Progressive specialisation: G1N (has only upper‐secondary level entry requirements)

Education level: Undergraduate level

Selection:

Selection is usually based on your grade point average from upper secondary school or the number of credit points from previous university studies, or both.