
Contested Histories
“I strongly support the idea of the IHJR assisting policymakers by identifying principles, processes and best practices.”
Ambassador Lamberto Zannier
OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities
Symposium on Contested Histories in Public Spaces
All Souls College, University of Oxford, March 28, 2019
Click here to read the full address
About the Project
The IHJR's project on Contested Histories in Public Spaces is a multi-year initiative intended to address controversies over statues, memorials, street names and other representations of disputed historical legacies in public spaces. The objective of the Contested Histories project is to provide decision-makers, policy planners, educators and other stakeholders with a set of case studies, best practices and guidelines for addressing historical contestations in an effective and responsible manner.
Background
Over the past several years there has been growing public controversy over contested historical legacies on university campuses and in public spaces in towns and cities around the world. The Rhodes Must Fall movement that began in Cape Town, South Africa, and the controversy over statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the United States, are but two examples (see below). Most contestations occur at the municipal or institutional level, where the physical representations of historical legacies are encountered on a daily basis, whether in the form of statues, street names, building names, monuments, memorials or emblems and symbols.
Conflict over interpretations of history span a range of issues including legacies of slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism, colonialism, inter-ethnic tensions, mass human rights abuses and other relevant subjects. In almost all cases calls for removal of statues, renaming of streets, and reframing of school or university curricula, are symptomatic of deeper divisions within societies.
Confronted with public protests, street demonstrations, and social media campaigns, decision makers have often responded in haste, sometimes in panic, and more often than not without the benefit of established principles, processes or best practices, resulting in remedies that are sometimes inadequate, ineffective or arbitrary with potentially long-term, unintended consequences.
Iconic cases
Below are a select number of iconic cases that are part of the Contested Histories project to catalogue more than one hundred cases.
The Rhodes Must Fall movement began in 2016 at the University of Cape Town. It called for the removal of Cecil Rhodes' statues and has since spread around the world.
A lawsuit was filed against Charlottesville city council in 2017 after they voted to remove a statue of General Lee. The council was charged with violating a law protecting veterans' memorials and monuments.
Shifting narratives and national memory surrounding the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, the site where the heir to the Autro-Hungarian empire was assassinated in 2014, have signified and resignified the site over the years. Today a neutral plaque has seemingly resolved tensions.
Interactive mapping
The Contested Histories project also seeks to provide an interactive map that shows the locations of contestations across the globe with a picture and short description. The cases will be organised by categories of contestation and an icon indicating if they are bounded to legal components. Below you can see a provisional version of the map. The interactive map will be released upon completion.

Expanding the project
The Contested Histories project is currently being expanded to other fields, for example the field of education. To look at the types of issues this project will engage with, take a look at the following documents:
- A Key to Unlock the Past: History Education in Macedonia: An Analysis of Today Suggestions for the Future.
- Too Much Memory, Too Much Amnesia: History and History Teaching in Abkhazia and Georgia.
- An Undesired Past: Report of the EUROCLIO assessment visit to Moldova.
- The Past in Relation to the Present: Korea’s Search for Historical Reconciliation with its Neighbours.
Project Aims
The Contested Histories project seeks to identify, document, and examine cases of contestation around the world, with the goal of identifying a set of principles, processes and best practices that can help inform decision making. To this end, the IHJR has identified more than a hundred cases in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. Each case is researched and tracked on a digital map connected to a database. The intention is to build an interactive web platform accessible to a wide range of stakeholders. Although each case is unique, and underlying causes within communities are often specific to individual societies and/or circumstances, it is hoped that the aggregated materials will provide insights that help facilitate better informed decision making when responding to future contestations, and provide a resource for educators interested in examining multi-perspective approaches to history education.
The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation is a research center at EUROCLIO and works in cooperation with a range of public, private and independent institutions. The publication of a volume on Contested Histories in Public Spaces is being overseen by an international Task Force and is supported in part by the International Bar Association, and Salzburg Global Seminar, with research support from Erasmus University, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford. The program team welcomes suggestions for cases to include in its study, which can be submitted to the following email: jansen@ihjr.org
Expected Outcomes
The project on Contested Histories in Public Spaces works towards providing the following outputs:
1. Principles, processes and guidelines for decision-makers;
2. Series of case studies in a published volume;
3. Global survey and mapping of contestations with relational database;
4. Digital platform to aggregate and disseminate relevant information;
5. Case study materials adapted for high school and university curricula.
Latest news
Which kinds of educational media triggers conflict, and which contribute to overcoming it?
Barbara Christophe
Articles
Before delving into this topic, two remarks on the limitations of my reflections must be noted. First of all, the focus will lie mainly on narrative strategies as conveyed in textbooks. Although this does not really tell us what is happening on the ground in history classrooms, textbooks offer us a window into official national …
Lamberto Zannier, HCNM: “Conflicts often have to do with the interpretation of history”
Motivated by a natural curiosity and well trained instincts, Lamberto Zannier, High Commissioner for National Minorities at the OSCE, attended the meeting organized around the project Contested Histories in Public Spaces in Oxford, which reviewed several cases of controversial monuments and statues around the world. In this meeting, Mr. Zannier explained the applicability of these …

“I strongly support the idea of the IHJR assisting policymakers by identifying principles, processes and best practices.”
Ambassador Lamberto Zannier
OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities
Symposium on Contested Histories in Public Spaces
All Souls College, University of Oxford, March 28, 2019
Click here to read the full address
About the Project
The IHJR's project on Contested Histories in Public Spaces is a multi-year initiative intended to address controversies over statues, memorials, street names and other representations of disputed historical legacies in public spaces. The objective of the Contested Histories project is to provide decision-makers, policy planners, educators and other stakeholders with a set of case studies, best practices and guidelines for addressing historical contestations in an effective and responsible manner.
Background
Over the past several years there has been growing public controversy over contested historical legacies on university campuses and in public spaces in towns and cities around the world. The Rhodes Must Fall movement that began in Cape Town, South Africa, and the controversy over statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the United States, are but two examples (see below). Most contestations occur at the municipal or institutional level, where the physical representations of historical legacies are encountered on a daily basis, whether in the form of statues, street names, building names, monuments, memorials or emblems and symbols.
Conflict over interpretations of history span a range of issues including legacies of slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism, colonialism, inter-ethnic tensions, mass human rights abuses and other relevant subjects. In almost all cases calls for removal of statues, renaming of streets, and reframing of school or university curricula, are symptomatic of deeper divisions within societies.
Confronted with public protests, street demonstrations, and social media campaigns, decision makers have often responded in haste, sometimes in panic, and more often than not without the benefit of established principles, processes or best practices, resulting in remedies that are sometimes inadequate, ineffective or arbitrary with potentially long-term, unintended consequences.
Iconic cases
Below are a select number of iconic cases that are part of the Contested Histories project to catalogue more than one hundred cases.

The Rhodes Must Fall movement began in 2016 at the University of Cape Town. It called for the removal of Cecil Rhodes' statues and has since spread around the world.

A lawsuit was filed against Charlottesville city council in 2017 after they voted to remove a statue of General Lee. The council was charged with violating a law protecting veterans' memorials and monuments.

Shifting narratives and national memory surrounding the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, the site where the heir to the Autro-Hungarian empire was assassinated in 2014, have signified and resignified the site over the years. Today a neutral plaque has seemingly resolved tensions.
Interactive mapping
The Contested Histories project also seeks to provide an interactive map that shows the locations of contestations across the globe with a picture and short description. The cases will be organised by categories of contestation and an icon indicating if they are bounded to legal components. Below you can see a provisional version of the map. The interactive map will be released upon completion.
Expanding the project
The Contested Histories project is currently being expanded to other fields, for example the field of education. To look at the types of issues this project will engage with, take a look at the following documents:
- A Key to Unlock the Past: History Education in Macedonia: An Analysis of Today Suggestions for the Future.
- Too Much Memory, Too Much Amnesia: History and History Teaching in Abkhazia and Georgia.
- An Undesired Past: Report of the EUROCLIO assessment visit to Moldova.
- The Past in Relation to the Present: Korea’s Search for Historical Reconciliation with its Neighbours.
Project Aims
The Contested Histories project seeks to identify, document, and examine cases of contestation around the world, with the goal of identifying a set of principles, processes and best practices that can help inform decision making. To this end, the IHJR has identified more than a hundred cases in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. Each case is researched and tracked on a digital map connected to a database. The intention is to build an interactive web platform accessible to a wide range of stakeholders. Although each case is unique, and underlying causes within communities are often specific to individual societies and/or circumstances, it is hoped that the aggregated materials will provide insights that help facilitate better informed decision making when responding to future contestations, and provide a resource for educators interested in examining multi-perspective approaches to history education.
The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation is a research center at EUROCLIO and works in cooperation with a range of public, private and independent institutions. The publication of a volume on Contested Histories in Public Spaces is being overseen by an international Task Force and is supported in part by the International Bar Association, and Salzburg Global Seminar, with research support from Erasmus University, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford. The program team welcomes suggestions for cases to include in its study, which can be submitted to the following email: jansen@ihjr.org
Expected Outcomes
The project on Contested Histories in Public Spaces works towards providing the following outputs:
1. Principles, processes and guidelines for decision-makers;
2. Series of case studies in a published volume;
3. Global survey and mapping of contestations with relational database;
4. Digital platform to aggregate and disseminate relevant information;
5. Case study materials adapted for high school and university curricula.
Latest news
Which kinds of educational media triggers conflict, and which contribute to overcoming it?
Barbara Christophe
Articles
Before delving into this topic, two remarks on the limitations of my reflections must be noted. First of all, the focus will lie mainly on narrative strategies as conveyed in textbooks. Although this does not really tell us what is happening on the ground in history classrooms, textbooks offer us a window into official national …
Lamberto Zannier, HCNM: “Conflicts often have to do with the interpretation of history”
Motivated by a natural curiosity and well trained instincts, Lamberto Zannier, High Commissioner for National Minorities at the OSCE, attended the meeting organized around the project Contested Histories in Public Spaces in Oxford, which reviewed several cases of controversial monuments and statues around the world. In this meeting, Mr. Zannier explained the applicability of these …