DescriptionDrawing on ethnographic data gathered in Cambodia and Rwanda, this thesis examines how local people in both countries engage with memorial sites created to commemorate mass atrocities. It focuses on two sites in each country, all of which prominently display human remains and other artifacts of atrocity. Building on Benedict Anderson’s conception of nations as “imagined communities” it seeks to probe how such sites, as curated by post-genocidal regimes, affect ideas of national belonging and whether they effectively create a narrative of “reassuring fratricide” upon which countries build a shared understanding of the nation’s past and present composition. According to my findings, although evidence of atrocity has been instrumentalized through memorialization in order to bolster the credibility of post-genocide regimes as rightful custodians of the nation, memorial sites pose a complex intervention in the eyes of the visiting public. Rather than fostering reconciliation, such memorial efforts can actually exacerbate underlying tensions related to national belonging and divergent historical experiences. Moreover, the purported need to preserve evidence of atrocity both challenges and, in some cases, modifies the local spiritual beliefs and customs of citizen visitors, reformulating the ways in which victims of state terror are either reintegrated into or rejected from the national body.