从历史的灰烬中：集体创伤与国际政治的形成

近年来，要求赔偿和恢复性司法的呼声，以及民粹主义冤情政治的兴起，表明了创伤记忆的顽强韧性。从跨国黑人生命问题运动呼吁正视奴隶制和种族压迫的遗留问题，到继续努力确保承认亚美尼亚种族灭绝或日本帝国侵犯人权的行为，国际政治充满了过去的暴力事件在现在重演的例子。但学者们应该如何理解创伤的长期影响呢？为什么有些创伤几代人都处于休眠状态，却在关键时刻重新浮出水面？创伤如何从个人扩展到更大的政治群体，如国家和国家，从而塑造政治身份、不满和决策？
在《从历史的灰烬中》一书中，亚当·B·勒纳将集体创伤视为国际政治中的一种基本力量——对政治文化的“冲击”，可以构成新的行动者，并长期影响决策。正如勒纳所展示的，揭示集体创伤在国际政治中的作用至关重要，原因有两个。首先，它有助于解释群体之间长期存在的紧张关系——在学者们研究民族主义和民粹主义的跨国复兴时，这是一个特别相关的话题。第二，它推动国际关系学科更全面地解释大规模暴力的真正长期代价，尤其是因为它们植根于长期的结构性不平等和不公正之中。虽然国际关系学在很大程度上忽视了创伤等非系统性、潜在的现象，但勒纳认为，集体创伤有助于划清国际政治团体之间的界限，并构建国际政治行动的逻辑框架。《历史的灰烬》通过三个历史案例揭示了集体创伤在印度、以色列和美国外交决策中的影响，展示了集体创伤作为研究大规模暴力遗产如何随着时间的推移死灰复燃和消散的理论视角的广泛效用。
From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics
In recent years, calls for reparations and restorative justice, alongside the rise of populist grievance politics, have demonstrated the stubborn resilience of traumatic memory. From the transnational Black Lives Matter movement’s calls for reckoning with the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, to continued efforts to secure recognition of the Armenian genocide or Imperial Japan’s human rights abuses, international politics is replete with examples of past violence reasserting itself in the present. But how should scholars understand trauma’s long-term impacts? Why do some traumas lie dormant for generations, only to surface anew in pivotal moments? And how does trauma scale from individuals to larger political groupings like nations and states, shaping political identities, grievances, and policymaking?
In From the Ashes of History, Adam B. Lerner looks at collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics–a “shock” to political cultures that can constitute new actors and shape decision-making over the long-term. As Lerner shows, uncovering collective trauma’s role in international politics is vital for two key reasons. First, it can help explain longstanding tensions between groups–an especially relevant topic as scholars examine the transnational resurgence of nationalism and populism. Second, it pushes the discipline of International Relations to more completely account for mass violence’s true long-term costs, particularly as they become embedded in longstanding structural inequalities and injustices. While IR scholarship has largely dismissed non-systematic, latent phenomena like trauma, Lerner argues that collective trauma can help draw the lines between international political groups and frame the logics of international political action. Drawing on three historical cases that uncover the impact of collective trauma in Indian, Israeli, and American foreign policymaking, From the Ashes of History demonstrates the broad utility of collective trauma as a theoretical lens for investigating how mass violence’s legacy can resurge and dissipate over time.

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