The politics of mourning: The virtual memorialisation of British fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

This article analyses the virtual memorialisation of British fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will study online obituaries published on two websites -BBC news and The Lasting Tribute. These sources are compared as examples of media-driven and community-driven memorialisation. This comparison enables us to study links between the mainstream media and the functioning of digital network communities, between public and private discourses of war memorialisation. The purpose of analysis is twofold: first, the article examines how virtual memorials represent fatalities, and, second, it discusses the political implications of virtual memorialisation. The article posits that although virtual memorials introduce professionalised and personalised accounts of the deaths of service personnel, they also enable a nationalistic discourse of war commemoration, and shape the politics of mourning in modern Britain.

Inventing the Swedish (War) Veteran

“…Thereto, even when alternative war stories can be imagined, the programme of recognition risks rendering such voices irrelevant or even inappropriate. The scripting of the veteran, the military, and the state through techniques of recognition and remembrance is, as also shown by others (Basham 2016a;Danilova 2015;King 2010; Refslund Sørensen 2017), often a highly depoliticized process, admittedly complex to critique without dishonouring the sacrifices of individual soldiers. In mid-2016, the Veteran Programme and its buzzword recognition faced no visible political opposition.…”

“…However, when encouraging the recognition of veterans, Ahlin seemingly also discourages public debate about the actions and contributions of Swedish troops on deployments. By doing so, the Speaker effectively de-contextualizes war deployments by the SAF and shifts focus from the conduct and consequences of international military missions to the sacrifices made by Swedish soldiers (see also Danilova 2015;King 2010). Following Meyer, such rhetoric can be understood as part of a post-9/11 discourse on neoliberal military interventions where 'peace' often is regarded as 'something that has to be imposed ' (2008, 565) and where doing something thus appears to be more important than doing right by something.…”

“…While governmental efforts to control and celebrate veteran identities, bodies and experiences certainly are familiar to many (critical) military scholars (Achter 2010;Ben-Ari 2005;Basham 2016aBasham , 2016bBulmer and Eichler 2017;Danilova 2015;King 2010), this is a novel storyline in the context of Sweden. The Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) has been described as a marginal and even distrusted institution of Swedish society (Berndtsson, Dandeker, and Ydén 2015), which often is attributed to Sweden's non-military participation in World War I and World War II and its identity as a formerly neutral, and still militarily non-aligned, 'peacekeeping state' (Agius 2011;Berndtsson, Dandeker, and Ydén 2015;Leander 2004;Åse and Wendt 2018).…”

Tweeting from the past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary @ABCNews1915

“…There is also a substantial literature emerging on online memorialisation (i.e. Danilova, 2015; Graham et al, 2015; New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2015; Papailias, 2016), much of which identifies the vernacular, interactive and public aspects of these expressions regard and grief. This includes Knudsen and Stage’s (2012) useful notion of the ‘commemorative emergence’ that is ‘continuously reinvested with new meanings’ (p. 419) as online responses accumulate to social media memorials, in many cases (but not all) to the recently deceased.…”

Journalism and mnemonic practices in Chinese social media: Remembering catastrophic events on Weibo

“…It grows out of China’s rapid social transition and reflects the creativity of Chinese Internet culture, which is deeply rooted in the history of contentious politics in China (Yang, 2009). Beyond the contemporary social contentions in China, this study also contributes to understanding the relationships between professional and personal, official and vernacular memories (Danilova, 2015; Lee, 2014).…”