participatory research, feminist methodology, affect, wijdan, reflexivity, decolonial knowledge
How can research attend to what is felt, sensed, and shared under conditions of conflict and repression? In classical Arabic, wijdan names an affective consciousness: the heart’s spontaneous encounter with fear, grief, beauty, or clarity. Sharing a root with wujūd (existence) it suggests that feeling is also a mode of being and knowing. Drawing on fieldwork in post-revolutionary Egypt, this entry develops wijdan as an affective methodology that brings bodily sensation, ethical judgment, collective memory, and relationality into one frame, offering a reparative, culturally grounded, and politically resonant approach to inquiry.
Dr. Dina Wahba is a senior researcher at the Arnold Bergstrassser Institute. She is a political scientist working at the intersection of gender, affect, and politics in the Middle East and Europe. Her work focuses on militarized masculinities, environmental activism, and the affective dimensions of state power and resistance.
She holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and has taught widely on gender, media, and international politics.
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Available in English: Youth Perspectives on Peace
ABSTRACT
Memory is a crucial driver of justice in postcolonial contexts, mediating the identities, temporalities and power relations embedded in colonial hierarchies. It bridges past atrocities, present inequities and future possibilities, offering both diagnostic insight and emancipatory potential. While memory studies and postcolonial studies have flourished, the conceptual link between memory and postcolonialism remains underexplored. Existing work documents colonial injustices and produces counter-memories challenging dominant narratives, but less attention has been given to memory’s broader role in confronting persistent hierarchies.
Memory operates in three interrelated dimensions. Diagnostically, it exposes colonial atrocities and the ongoing legacies of structural inequality, highlighting how colonial power continues to shape contemporary social, political and economic relations. Performatively, memory constructs collective identities and shared meanings, mobilising communities and social movements. Through storytelling, art and commemoration, memory produces solidarity and enables political advocacy, transforming recollection into action. Projectively, memory anticipates the future; recollecting past injustices motivates efforts to create alternative, more just and equitable societies. Memory is therefore not only retrospective but also forward-looking, linking historical trauma to aspirational possibilities and utopias.
In a postcolonial world still shaped by the ongoing legacies and power structures of colonialism, this temporal interconnection renders memory both a tool of resistance and a vehicle for transformation. By foregrounding silenced narratives and excluded histories, communities honour their past while shaping visions of justice-oriented futures. Utopia emerges not as an abstract ideal but as a dynamic, contested horizon that guides activism and imagination. Memory’s diagnostic, performative and projective dimensions collectively enable societies to confront enduring colonial legacies, cultivate hope, and construct politically and ethically grounded visions of the future.
Memory is an important driver for justice in a postcolonial world. Memory mediates the identities, temporalities and power relations that are central to postcolonial hierarchies. As a consequence, memory has the potential to serve as an emancipatory tool: by making the past relevant in the present memory can affect the present and also influence the future, rendering it more just. In order to achieve this memory needs to be activated and performed, paying attention to colonial legacies and structural injustice in the present and providing a vision for the future. Memory can thus serve as a reminder of past mistakes and injustices, motivating societies to take steps to prevent similar occurrences in the future. But how do memory and justice relate?
This entry approaches the topic of colonial legacies from the perspective of memory studies. The intention is not to provide an account of memory as a site of struggle about competing interpretations of the past, but rather to outline the social function of memory in general while making reference to colonial pasts. Importantly, in this article the focus is not so much on nationalist, top-down projects of memorialisation as it is on societal, emancipatory projects acting from below. With memory studies and postcolonial studies both flourishing as areas of research, it is surprising that memory and postcolonialism have rarely been linked conceptually in the existing academic literature. While there is an increasing body of research on remembering colonial injustices or providing counter-memory in order to challenge the hegemonic canon (Buckley-Zistel & Koloma Beck, ) , there are few studies at a conceptual level that draw out the relevance of memory for challenging postcolonial hierarchies in general (see also Rothberg, , p. 360). The importance of linking these two aspects is stressed by Göttsche, who states:
How to cite this entry:
Holanda Maschietto, R., Ferreira, M. A., Cortinhas, J. & Carvalho de Oliveira, G. (2026, May 13). Youth Perspectives on Peace: Insights from Brazil on the Role of Care, Empowerment and Social Change. Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. BMFTR – Network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20184943. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/youth-perspectives-on-peace/
Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Emma Pritchard, Álvaro Okura de Almeida, and Juliana González Villamizar in a thought-provoking roundtable on truth commissions, transitional justice, and post-/decolonial approaches to time and temporality.
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