Fault-lines: four short observations on places of peace, trauma, and contested remembrance

Preservation of historical remains is ridden with complexity. In particular, battle landscapes are multi-layered, with many different and intersecting ideas and meanings about identity, place and landscape production. This article explores the site of battle as a place of the imagination, as a site of continued dispute, a ‘debatable land’. Focusing on contested terrain in northern Europe, the article also briefly examines the creation of new monuments in ‘imperial’ London and New York, suggesting that the lack of a dialogical rationale for such memorabilia fails to extend the language of remembrance, settling instead for monolithic forms that perpetuate the status quo, prioritizing the ‘plinth’ over more fluid forms of remembering.