The Transnationalization of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” New Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Spread of Human Rights and Globalization of Memory

Since the early 2000s, “memory” has become a tool for the development of human rights policies, in post-conflict societies as well as in old democracies, as much at a transnational scale as within national frameworks. This evolution has been seen so far as a sign of the birth of a global memory, this “cosmopolitan memory”—carried first and foremost by the memory of the Holocaust—and expected to be a vector of human rights. The globalization of the memory of the “Righteous Among the Nations” as humanitarian figures offers the opportunity to question this apparent link between memory and human rights empirically. In doing so, this article aims to identify what other than the “global” and the “humanitarian” can be at stake in these so-called “memory” policies. This article combines the neo-institutionalist approach and discursive approach to public policy in order to revisit the linkage between strategic, cognitive, and institutional dimensions at the heart of the processes of memory.