This lecture introduces “conspiratorial memory” as an emergent paradigm of memory politics in contemporary international relations. It begins from the observation that claims of genocide, historical victimhood, and moral injury – once central to liberal and left-leaning frameworks of cosmopolitan memory (Levy and Sznaider 2002) – are increasingly weaponized by authoritative actors in geopolitical conflict. A striking example is the Russian state’s campaign to secure recognition of a Nazi “genocide of the Soviet people,” a project that folds World War II remembrance into contemporary foreign policy and frames present conflicts through conspiratorial narratives of historical injustice and concealment.

Calling this emerging configuration “conspiratorial memory,” the lecture examines how it relies on a conspiracybased hermeneutics that foregrounds hidden intent, hostile encroachment, and deliberate concealment. In this process, cosmopolitan registers of remembrance – legal language, genocide discourse, and transnational commemorative practices – become tools for authoritative politics. By oscillating between claims of (hitherto unacknowledged) victimhood and self-proclaimed heroic agency, conspiratorial logic enables actors to present themselves simultaneously as historically injured subjects and as authoritative custodians of moral and geopolitical order.

These rhetorical moves do more than instrumentalize a selective reading of the past: they reorganize historical time, framing contemporary conflict as an unfinished historical struggle in which (Soviet-)Russia appears both as triumphant hero and as tragic victim. The lecture concludes by reflecting on how such authoritative memory practices may reshape academic and policy debates about trauma, justice, and historical responsibility.

Dr. Boris Noordenbos is Associate Professor of Literary & Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. After publishing the monograph Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity (2016), he now is the principal investigator of the ECR-funded research project CONSPIRATORIAL MEMORY: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe (2021-2026), which focuses on a on a selection of recent conspiracy-based cultural imaginations from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. His most recent article, “The counter-hegemonic hegemon: A cross-platform analysis of a Kremlin-backed strategic narrative” (co-written with Marc Tuters) appeared in Platforms & Society earlier this year.
 

The event will be attended by the Slavic Studies Colloquium group.