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Between 2012 and 2017, at the Ł-section of Warsaw's Powązki Military Cemetery, or 'Łączka', the Polish Institute of National Remembrance exhumed a mass grave containing the remains of post-war anti-communist resistance fighters. Being referred to as the 'cursed soldiers', these fighters have become key figures in post-2015 Polish memory politics. In this article we focus on the role of the volunteers at these exhumations in the production of the 'cursed soldiers' memory. Following the idea of community archaeology as a civil society-building practice, the observed processes of sacralisation and militarisation show how the exhumations create a community of memory that promotes the core values of the currently governing national-conservative PiS party. We found that tropes related to forensic research and typically identified with cosmopolitan memory paradigms are used within a generally nationalist and antagonistic memory framework.

The Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp has been widely described and studied, especially as the images taken by British troops at the moment of the camp's liberation shaped the very representation of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. Much less-known are the debates about the exhumations of more than 20 000 corpses of inmates, the ones who died in the weeks before or after the liberation. The French mission in search of corpses of deportees, the so-called 'Garban mission', tried to negotiate the access to the camp grounds. After an international uproar and a decade of negotiations, the permission was finally not granted.

This article explores how a group of relatives of fallen soldiers of the Malvinas War inhabited death from the immediate aftermath of the conflict to the identification of the bodies in 2017. From a perspective borrowed from the anthropology of death and the body, it discusses how the status of these bodies shaped their relatives' representations of these deaths, understood as holy, heroic and sacrificial and inhabited through the performance of various mourning rituals. Finally, it demonstrates how the prospect of exhumation provoked resistance and fear, due to the unpredictable agency of the 'corporeality of the dead' in social life.

The persistent resentment towards classical liberal principles especially individualism and free market in contemporary Africa, represents an outcome of decades of ambush against the ideology despite its clear connections with traditional African philosophy and relevance to the prosperity of modern African states. This work attempts to draw comparisons between social and economic organisation in traditional Africa and classical liberal principles. Contrary to literatures that portray the community as the real and only end in traditional African societies, elements like free trade; market economy; consensus; anarchy and limited governance negates this position. While tracing the cause of Africa's cling to socialism and communism, this paper presents an ideological transition from pre-colonialism to nationalist and post-independent Africa. It concludes by demystifying the arguments of individualism as antithetical to African morality. It also justified the inevitability of classical liberal principles in modern Africa.

Graves are central to Zimbabwe's political landscape since they constitute sites of contestation in respect of memory and identity. Given the legacies of the Gukurahundi genocide, it is fitting to examine the debates and controversies surrounding the Zimbabwean government's plans to exhume the remains of victims from mass graves. In 1983 the Robert Mugabe led government deployed a military unit (the Fifth Brigade) to the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, supposedly to quash a "dissident" movement. The military unit went on to commit unspeakable crimes against civilians. By the time the Gukurahundi genocide ended in 1987, at least 20 000 Ndebele speaking people had been killed. Memories of these horrendous crimes remain repressed and heavily guarded by the state, though there are increasing calls for justice, as well as calls to commemorate and rebury the victims of the Gukurahundi genocide. Recently, the government has been advocating the "fast track" exhumation and reburial of Gukurahundi victims. However, some civic groups in Matabeleland are resisting this state engineered mechanism of exhumation and social healing. Given that mass graves represent "crime scenes" and "wounds of history", this article investigates the politics of memory triggered by the government's planned exhumation of Gukurahundi victims from mass graves. It explores how discourses on the exhumation of genocide victims from mass graves are mediated and contested in spaces of communication, such as news websites and Twitter. This article, which is informed by Achille Mbembe's theorisation of necropolitics, concludes that mass graves and bodily remains connected to the Gukurahundi genocide constitute symbolic representations of the ongoing political struggles in Zimbabwe. The government's attempt to appropriate, to manage and to control the Gukurahundi exhumations and reburials demonstrates its reaffirmation of necropolitics, which is an effort by the regime to obscure the massacre, to obliterate evidence and to legitimise its sovereignty. ...

In recent years, exhumation campaigns of mass graves resulting from the armed conflict
(1980–2000) between the Maoist guerrillas of PCP-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the
States armed forces have increased in Peru. People in rural Andes, the most marginalised
sectors of national society, which were also particularly affected by the war, are the
main group concerned with exhumations. This article examines the handling, flow and
re-appropriation of exhumed human remains in public space to inform sociopolitical issues
underlying the reparation policies implemented by the State, sometimes with the support of
human rights NGOs. How do the families of victims become involved in this unusual return
of their dead? Have the exhumations become a new repertoire of collective action for
Andean people seeking to access their fundamental rights and for recognition of their
status as citizens? Finally, what do these devices that dignify the dead reveal about the
internal workings of Peruvian society – its structural inequities and racism – which
permeate the social fabric?

Since the early 1990s, armed actors have invaded territories in the Chocó and Antioquia
departments of Colombia, inhabited by Afro-Colombians and Indians whose collective rights
in these territories had recently been legally recognised. Based on long-term fieldwork
among the Emberá Katío, this article examines social, cosmological and ritual alterations
and re-organisation around violent death. Following a national policy of post-conflict
reparations, public exhumations and identifications of human remains reveal new local
modes of understanding and administration. In particular, suicide, hitherto completely
unknown to the Emberá, broke out in a multitude of cases, mostly among the youth. Local
discourse attributes this phenomenon to the number of stray corpses resulting from the
violence, who are transformed into murderous spirits which shamans can no longer control.
The analysis focusses on the unprecedented articulation of a renewed eschatology, the
intricate effects of an internal political reorganisation and the simultaneous inroad into
their space of new forms of armed insurrectional violence. Thus the article will shed
light on the emergence of a new transitional moral economy of death among the Emberá.

The article concerns the wartime history of Peru and examines both topdown and bottom-up practices of accounting for the internal conflict of 1980–2000, which were initiated in the background of the warfare. The aim of the article is to discuss the connections I observed between the phenomena referred to in the title: return migrations of the inhabitants of the central-southern province, their search for the victims of forced disappearances, as well as the exhumation challenges emerging since the beginning of the war. In other words, the text constitutes an attempt to contextualise the above-mentioned issues given competing versions of memory about political violence in the Andes, with particular focus on their top-down determinants in the Fujimorism era.

The article concerns the wartime history of Peru and examines both topdown and bottom-up practices of accounting for the internal conflict of 1980–2000, which were initiated in the background of the warfare. The aim of the article is to discuss the connections I observed between the phenomena referred to in the title: return migrations of the inhabitants of the central-southern province, their search for the victims of forced disappearances, as well as the exhumation challenges emerging since the beginning of the war. In other words, the text constitutes an attempt to contextualise the above-mentioned issues given competing versions of memory about political violence in the Andes, with particular focus on their top-down determinants in the Fujimorism era.

Par une approche sociologique et ethnographique, cet article propose d'interroger le processus de mémorialisation basé sur l'expérience de la disparition forcée subie durant la dictature de Pinochet. L'analyse se focalise sur le cas du Patio 29 , au sein du cimetière général de Santiago, lieu utilisé par le régime militaire chilien pour occulter les corps et effacer l'identité de ses victimes. Il s'agit d'aborder, dans une perspective diachronique, la manière dont la gestion des disparus, et ensuite celle de leurs cadavres retrouvés, a durablement affecté la société chilienne jusqu'à nos jours, sur le plan politique et symbolique. Ainsi, cette étude s'intéresse d'abord aux motifs et aux modalités d'inhumation clandestine des corps réalisée par les militaires, afin d'examiner son impact sur la population et plus particulièrement sur l'entourage des victimes qui espère les revoir en vie tant que les corps ne sont pas réapparus. Il s'agit aussi de montrer comment, une fois le décès de leurs proches accepté, les familles se mobiliseront pour réclamer la vérité sur leur destinée posthume afin de localiser leurs restes. Enfin, l'article rend compte des importantes controverses relatives au processus d'exhumation et d'identification des disparus du Patio 29 dans le contexte démocratique des années 1990 et s'attache à une lecture critique du phénomène de patrimonialisation du Patio 29 au Chili.