OPINION:
Much of the news we consume today is told through the personalities of leaders. We ask what drives them, what they fear, whom they blame and why they respond to crises as they do.
Yet one influence on leadership receives surprisingly little attention: the way leaders understand the historical traumas they inherit.
I have spent several years researching leaders whose families and societies lived through genocide, apartheid, civil war, dictatorship, colonialism and political persecution.
What I found was striking: Leaders can inherit remarkably similar burdens (fear, humiliation, grief and vigilance) yet do profoundly different things with them.
Broadly speaking, I encountered two kinds of leaders.
The first have confronted the painful histories they carry. They do not forget the past or minimize its injustices. Instead, they transform memory into a source of responsibility.
Nelson Mandela embodied this approach. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not ask victims of apartheid to forget; it acknowledged suffering while seeking to prevent that suffering from determining the country’s future.
The second kind of leader does something very different. Rather than process inherited trauma, such leaders continually reactivate it, as Slobodan Milosevic did. History becomes evidence that the group remains under threat. Old enemies remain enemies; new adversaries are folded into familiar stories of persecution.
Fear and grievance become politically useful.
This distinction matters far beyond politics. Every leader inherits some combination of family history, national history and collective memory. Those histories quietly shape how leaders understand danger, justice, trust and belonging.
For me, this question is also personal. I am a third-generation descendant of the Armenian genocide. For much of my life, I thought that my obligation was simply to remember. My research has persuaded me that remembrance requires something more: a decision about the memory’s purpose.
The choice is not between remembering and forgetting. Real choice lies in what remembering is made to do, whether it enlarges our capacity for responsibility or imprisons another generation in the wounds of the last.
As we try to understand the leaders dominating today’s headlines, we should pay closer attention not only to what they remember, but to what they choose to do with those memories.
LARA A. TCHOLAKIAN
Author, “Leaders Emerging from Collective Trauma: Journeys of Transgenerational Healing”
Yerevan, Armenia
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