The idea of a Peace Museum has emerged from creative thinking by the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) and Memria.org to contribute to long-term peace, stability, and economic growth by finding new ways to focus on positive examples of peacebuilding in the region and to expose citizens of the Western Balkans, as well as others (including visitors), to these examples. By doing so, partners hope to contribute to the ways in which people “imagine” the future: broadening the imagination about what is possible and desirable to establish meaningful peace.

The term “museum” in this project is used broadly, as a placeholder for numerous possible types of experience. In this broad sense, museums can play a variety of functions in a society. They are, in essence, a kind of educational institution. The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, for example, greets visitors with a large welcoming sign saying “A Museum is a School”. Museums can also play a truth-telling function, creating exhibits that help to “limit the range of permissible lies”, the words of Michael Ignatieff (speaking of truth commissions). Museums can become archives and repositories of institutional and community memory. They can be convening spaces. And they can be areas of reasoned exchange and dialogue about the future of sustainable peace.