In May 2020, two statues of French administrator Victor Schoelcher were destroyed in Martinique by members of the local youth group Ligue de Défense Noire Africaine (LDNA/Black African Defence League). Despite being a celebrated figure for his role in abolishing slavery in the French colonies, Schoelcher’s legacy has come under… Read More
In the summer of 2020, a monument to the victims of Stalinist political repression was unveiled in the city of Tayshet in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. On July 4, 2020, the monument was vandalised and defaced, making the inscription illegible. During Soviet rule, the Gulag camp Taishetlag was located near the… Read More
On Vallabhai Jhaverbhai Patel’s 143rd birthday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled India’s tribute to him in the form of the world’s tallest statue. Standing at 182 metres, the Statue of Unity is almost double the height of the Statue of Liberty. It was revealed with military celebration and Hindu inaugural… Read More
The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, holds the dichotomous and, at times, violentlegacy of race in the American South. It memorialises Edmund Pettus, a leader of the Whitesupremacist Ku Klux Klan, and it was a site of pivotal Civil Rights Movement protests in the 1960s.Two petitions to rename the… Read More
In 2020, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin sparked controversy during his visit to Algeria after posting a video on Twitter attending a memorial at the Monument of the Martyr (makam el-chahid) in Algiers. The monument was inaugurated in 1982 to mark the 20th anniversary of Algerian independence from France and… Read More
The erection of a memorial to the 1,484 Jewish residents of Kavala killed during the Holocaust provoked a dispute between Jewish advocates and the City Council, grounded in anti-Semitic rhetoric. The memorial’s unveiling was delayed amidst calls to remove the Star of David from its face, prompting criticism from the… Read More
During the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Headquarters of then-President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party were set on fire. While initially, the building was not intended as a monument, it acquired intense symbolic significance in the aftermath of the revolution. Consequently, the fate of the building in the post-revolutionary era became… Read More
The Skopje 2014 project, whose objective was to create a ‘homogenised space’ that showcased Macedonian history and culture, was decisive for installing the Sekenderbeu monument. Even though the monument was planned to promote unity between the different ethnicities of the country, the top-down approach and the narrative created remain contested. Read More
In June 2020 the chairman of Afrosvenskarnas riksförbund (the Afro-Swedish National Federation) called for the removal of a statue of Gustav III, the king who brought Sweden into the transatlantic slave trade and made Sweden a colonising power through his purchase of the Caribbean island of Saint-Barthelémy in 1784. However,… Read More
In 2015, the student organisation Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford was established to protest against the statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College. The initial two-year campaign led to promises from Oriel to contextualise the monument, which ultimately went unfulfilled. The campaign was reignited in June 2020… Read More
The era of British colonisation and the Biafran War are the significant moments that have defined present-day Nigeria. The British occupation of Nigeria lasted from the 1880s until October 1 1960, when the country gained independence. Long-standing divisions between the three main ethnic groups – the Yoruba, the Igbo, and… Read More