By Cato Litangen, Mimeta
I read the Norwegian government report NOU 2023:17 “Nå er det alvor” (“This is serious now”) with culture in mind and keep returning to the idea that before military force is used there is a struggle over history, institutions and the information environment. Before the uniforms and weapons appear, the field of memory functions as a pre-military zone, where interpretations of the past, of loyalty and of belonging shape the room for manoeuvre. In this perspective, the culture sector is part of the infrastructure the NOU-commission calls for when it stresses trust, historical knowledge, open debate and the use of the whole of society’s resources. I made this reading after a museum director told me about a lecture she had attended by Professor Kari Aga Myklebost in Vadsø, where memory politics in the north was at the centre of the discussion.
In practice, this pre-military struggle over memory plays out through a set of familiar mechanisms. Narratives about the past are formed, in which key concepts such as liberation, guilt and victimhood are distributed between groups and states. These narratives are then anchored in institutions, in museums, schools, archives and monuments, so that they become not just opinions but frameworks for what is treated as historically true. Information flows are managed through legislation, budgets, platform rules and ownership, which decide which experiences remain visible and which slowly disappear from public view. Over time, this new landscape of memory is normalised. When crises and conflicts intensify, societies are already inside an interpretative frame that makes some choices appear natural and others almost unthinkable. The same frame can make institutions cautious and citizens more willing to yield.
The northern regions show how this logic emerges in a Norwegian context. NOU 2023:17 describes Northern Norway as a frontline in security policy. Today, that frontline is also a front in the politics of memory. Along the coast stand memorial stones, plaques and small museums that were created during a period of more settled interpretations of war and liberation. The renegotiation of these stories now takes place in a different security climate. Delegations, friendship visits and cultural events are coupled with digital campaigns that highlight the Soviet role in liberation and the long Russian presence in the north. Narratives about who came as liberator and who posed a threat feed directly into assessments of today’s alliances. Cultural institutions in the north become places where influence operations can be observed, understood and addressed, both in their physical spaces and in the comment fields of the internet.
Autocratic memory strategies follow the same mechanisms, only with greater intensity. In Russia, so-called memory laws regulate how the Soviet Union’s role in the Second World War can be discussed and punish those who equate Soviet and Nazi crimes. Here the law defines which words about the past are permitted. At the same time, institutions are reframed. The Gulag Museum in Moscow has been closed and reopened as a Museum of Memory, with its main emphasis on Nazi crimes against the Soviet people. The centre of gravity shifts from state violence against its own citizens to national suffering. What changes is not the institutional shell but the interpretation. The state holds the power to decide what is to be remembered, and the effect is that memories of its own abuses are weakened as a starting point for criticism of current exercises of power.
Argentina shows a different version, where the formal legal framework changes less, while institutions and funding are used to drain established memory work of its force. The former ESMA navy mechanics school in Buenos Aires has been a central site of remembrance for the violence of the military dictatorship. Under President Javier Milei funding is cut, the leadership is replaced and activities are halted, while well-documented accounts of the junta’s crimes are recast as just one narrative among several. On the surface, the buildings remain and the verdicts against those responsible stands. What weakens is the living memory, the way it is communicated, researched and discussed. Over time, the authority of past truth-seeking is undermined and room opens for alternative stories that redefine guilt and responsibility. Read against NOU 2023:17, this implies that cultural resilience and institutional independence must be regarded as part of preparedness, including when the pressure comes through budget cuts and organisational moves rather than explicit bans.
The politics of memory does not stop at national borders. Experiences from Finnmark I North of Norway show how states try to steer how they are described far beyond their own territory, through cross-border censorship and pressure on cultural institutions, festivals and partners. When states identify themes they do not want discussed, whether occupation, persecution of minorities or war crimes, they approach organisers, sponsors or platforms that can limit unwanted content. The result is that museums and organisers in democratic states are drawn into a censorship regime developed elsewhere but felt on their own stages. Here state-directed memory politics meets institutional vulnerability. It is not the law in the host country that sets the boundaries of expression, but a combination of financial dependencies, diplomatic considerations and platform rules.
Syria and Ukraine show how memory work can function as a precursor to transitional justice while violence is still ongoing. Initiatives such as the Syria Prisons Museum reconstruct prisons in digital form, collect testimonies and build archives that can later be used in court proceedings. Ukrainian museums document destruction, collect objects and witness statements, and function at the same time as spaces for grief and reflection. In the academic literature this is sometimes described as “warring memory”, where the work of remembrance is part of the conflict itself. It is about preserving traces before they vanish, naming abuses before they are rewritten, building a documented counter-narrative to the aggressor’s version. Seen in light of NOU 2023:17, this shows that the culture sector’s contribution to preparedness also lies in competence in documentation, archiving and the digital protection of evidence, in methods for gathering and storing material and managing metadata and testimonies ethically, so that experiences are not lost when crises move into periods of negotiation.
Gaza and Sudan point to another aspect, namely what happens when the infrastructure of memory itself comes under attack. When museums, archives and historic buildings are destroyed, the memory of what happened is weakened, and so is the ability to hold anyone to account later. Yet improvised rescue efforts take shape. Local actors hide objects, digitise material and record destruction. Artists and activists use simple digital tools to secure traces that can survive bombings and displacement. Translated into a Norwegian context, this points towards concrete emergency plans for cultural institutions, physical protection of collections, but also redundancy, mirroring and distribution of digital archives. The question is not only how cultural heritage can be protected, but how it can be restored after attacks. Within a total preparedness approach this links closely to the commission’s emphasis on critical societal functions that must be robust, but flexible enough to include a more informal cultural home guard.
China illustrates a slower but equally effective form of memory politics, where maps, language and education are gradually altered in regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang. The core is not spectacular arrests or museum closures, but a systematic shift in what appears natural and self-evident. Place names change. Historical references are repeated or drop away. Certain experiences remain in syllabuses while others are omitted. Some theorists describe this as a colonisation of perception. NOU 2023:17 stresses the importance of language and culture in preparedness work. For the culture sector this means taking responsibility for monitoring seemingly technical changes in names, curriculum frameworks and funding streams. Small shifts in what is named, and how, can over time change which experiences enter public discourse and which political choices appear possible.
Democratic states are not exempt. There are examples that touch directly on what the commission calls threats to trust and legitimacy. In the United States, several states have introduced laws that limit teaching on critical race theory and structural racism. Teachers and schools report uncertainty over what they are allowed to teach, and some museums and libraries face pressure over exhibitions and book choices. The pattern is not necessarily a single authoritarian strategy, but structural pressure, where political majorities use law and funding to narrow the space for what can be said about the past. In Hungary, the former government gradually took control of central cultural institutions and educational environments since 2010. Theatre boards have been reconfigured, arts education gathered into new structures, and leaders loyal to the ruling party placed in key positions. Controversial monuments that highlight Hungarian innocence during the Second World War play down the country’s role in the deportation of Jews. After fifteen years, Hungary has a cultural public sphere in which central institutions largely reflect a single national narrative. The difference between this and more explicit autocratic memory politics lies less in its effect, a narrowed public sphere, than in the degree of formal authority and the counterforces that still exist. It is also striking that the new party Tisza did not fight an openly divisive culture war with Fidesz in which narratives of identity and history dominated the campaign, but concentrated on criticising the centralisation of institutions.
The digital layer of today’s hybrid age intensifies all of these trends. NOU 2023:17 treats the information environment as an area of preparedness in its own right, in which digital platforms, algorithms and systems of moderation shape what people see and what they take to be true. Human Rights Watch has documented systematic downgrading and removal of Palestine-related content on Facebook and Instagram after 7 October and during the war in Gaza. Posts and accounts that express support for Palestinian rights or document abuses have been removed or restricted far more often than other content, in part because of automated systems, lists of prohibited terms and weak mechanisms for correcting errors. The effect is that certain experiences become less visible long before anyone writes the definitive history. At the same time, the same platforms are used by artists, activists and institutions to document destruction, share testimonies and build alternative archives. Digital infrastructure is therefore both a space of censorship and of counter-memory and forms a distinct layer of memory politics that the culture sector needs to understand as a central field of preparedness.
Taken together, these examples reveal a temporal logic. First comes a struggle over interpretation of the past. Then follow changes to the institutions that carry memory. Controls on information flow and visibility are tightened. Then are political and military decisions made inside a shifted sense of what counts as normal. Struggles over memory confer new legitimacy. That legitimacy creates a wider space for political action. That wider space is used to make decisions that would once have met stronger resistance. For a Norwegian total preparedness this means that memory politics cannot be treated as a side-issue. It is part of the security logic itself. The difference between intentional, strategic memory politics in autocracies and structural pressure within and on democratic systems must be kept clear. That does not alter the fact that both can weaken a society’s ability to speak truthfully about its own past when pressure mounts.
The culture sector’s contribution to preparedness lies exactly here. It lies in the ability to recognise and describe memory strategies, laws that narrow the space for independent history, institutional changes that reframe or hollow out critical environments, symbolic politics that shift notions of guilt and digital systems that render certain narratives invisible, and to document these as concrete political acts. It lies in keeping open spaces in which societies can speak truthfully about their own past, even when it is politically uncomfortable. It lies in building and protecting archives, museums, stages and digital collections that carry experiences forward and make it possible to question new narratives, including in times of crisis. Read in this light, NOU 2023:17 places culture at the centre of preparedness in the moment when the field of memory becomes a zone of conflict, which is what Professor Kari Aga Myklebost pointed to from the podium in Vadsø.
