Intergenerational trauma ‘in reverse’: A critique of the modes of circulation of combatants’ memories in Colombia

This article rethinks intergenerational trauma through the problem of directionality and the social forms through which war memories circulate. Scholarship on intergenerational trauma has often relied on a descendant, family- and blood-based model in which traumatic content travels vertically from older ‘carriers’ to younger ‘recipients’. Drawing on Colombian post-conflict materials on ex-combatants’ family ties – especially mothers’ experiences around recruitment, disappearance, reunion, stigma and responsibility, as well as adoptive and extended kin configurations shaped by war – this article argues that traumatic memory frequently circulates relationally and multidirectionally, including ascendant trajectories (from children to parents) and transfilial trajectories (beyond consanguinity and nuclear kin). Conceptually, the article shifts the analytic focus from transmission as inheritance/succession to circulation as role-based, mediated and politically contested. It further situates intergenerational trauma within a broader ecology of traumatic circulation by clarifying its relationship to secondary and vicarious traumatisation, and by foregrounding the work of silence, secrecy and affective responsibility in shaping what can and cannot be remembered. The article concludes by proposing a vocabulary for analysing war memory beyond unidirectional descent, with implications for memory research in other post-violence settings.