VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Building on the turn in Peace Studies towards ‘many peaces’ (Dietrich, 2012) and the interplay of ‘local peacebuilding processes and international policy’ (Richmond and Mac Ginty, 2020), this paper compares meaning-making of peace across cultural heritage sites: in Britain at the Peace Museum, Japan at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and Kenya at the Aembu Peace Museum. Utilising recent scholarship in Museums for Peace by Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Kimberly Baker and Munuve Mutisya (2023), the paper further considers the place of objects and oral cultures in facilitating meaning-making around peace in relation to bodies. By placing these different geographical and culturally distinct peace museums in dialogue, the paper advocates for a more reflexive, situated knowledge approach to cultural heritage and peace discourse as a culturally mediated and relationally contingent process. In order to achieve this, the paper draws on the feminist framework of Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ whereby the politics and epistemologies of situating are viewed ‘from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity’ (1988, p. 589). Taking a Cultural Heritage Studies stance I explore how meaning-making of the concept of peace in peace museums is historically, culturally and politically specific to social beings in the production of their knowledge.