From collective guilt to moral implication in collective memory studies

In 1998, a seminal piece of research showed that individuals bearing no personal responsibility for past ingroup wrongdoings reacted negatively when reminded of them. Addressing a multidirectionality of collective memories of intergroup violence, the number of studies of collective guilt building upon these initial findings quickly grew. Nevertheless, complexities and ambiguities needing to be addressed were also uncovered. Today, although the potential heuristic of the original concept remains, its theoretical framing is expanding. An overly schematic distinction between perpetrators and victims is contested, and a more nuanced idea of moral implication is gaining momentum. By exploring negative moral emotions that have been experienced by a plurality of subjects folded into inherited histories and structures of violence, this idea allows us to consider negative emotional reactions of morally implicated subjects not only as a burden from a heavy past, but also as an unexpected opportunity for social transformations of old intergroup injustices.