Cynthia Milton's new book, Conflicted Memory, could hardly be more relevant to the political situation in Peru today. In December 2017, after months of speculation, then President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski released another former president, Alberto Fujimori, from prison to serve the remainder of his 25-year sentence for corruption and human rights abuses under house arrest. Fujimori's release came at the culmination of months of intense debate, public protest and political infighting in which the question of who should be considered a perpetrator of violence, and who a victim, during Peru's internal armed conflict (1980–2000) was hotly contested in the public sphere. Milton's new historical and interdisciplinary work, which develops an engaging and original analysis of the memory narratives advanced by military figures about the conflict, is therefore a timely and important contribution to both contemporary memory debates in Peru and the existing literature on memory studies in Latin America.

Since Fujimori's downfall in 2000, and the publication three years later of the final report by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, CVR), the Peruvian military's role in the conflict has been regularly contested, particularly by scholars such as Carlos Iván Degregori (How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path's Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999, University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) and Jo-Marie Burt (Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Although still critical of the military's role, Milton's book focuses less on individual events and more on how the military have constructed their own image in this post-Fujimori era as victims of the human rights community's search for justice. Several scholars, including David Durand (‘Una “máquina mutiladora”: El discurso del Ejército peruano durante el conflicto armado interno’, in Francesca Denegri and Alexandra Hibbett (eds.), Dando Cuenta, PUCP, 2016) and Javier Pizarro Romero (‘La construcción de la identidad en los testimonios de los expolicías y exmilitares recogidos por la Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación’, in ibid.), have previously sought to understand the construction of military and police memories of the conflict. However, Conflicted Memory is a far more comprehensive analysis, going beyond the study of recorded testimony to also examine cultural artefacts produced by former soldiers, as well as military responses to the narratives developed by the human rights community.

By taking a cultural approach to post-conflict memory studies in Peru, Milton builds on her own previous work, as well as on that of Víctor Vich (Poéticas del duelo: Ensayos sobre arte, memoria y violencia política en el Perú, IEP, 2015) and Anne Lambright (Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru, Liverpool University Press, 2015). This literature has demonstrated a multitude of ways in which cultural producers have used cinema, literature, theatre and retablos to commemorate the past in a manner which is deeply tied to ongoing transitional justice processes and the search for truth. Milton's work is therefore invaluable in contributing unique insights from the Peruvian conflict to the wider literature on cultural memory and transitional justice in Latin America (which has previously focused predominantly on the post-dictatorship societies of the Southern Cone).

Chapter 1 analyses several testimonial-style books about the conflict produced by military men, including Edwin Donayre, Pablo Morán Reyna and Jesús Sosa. Whilst each is unique in its own way, Milton argues that these books share a common approach by deploying a form and language more commonly associated with victims of violence and human rights activists (for example, Rigoberto Menchú). In a manner reminiscent of transitional justice campaigns in the Southern Cone, which challenged official state accounts of violence and called into question the nature of truth through attention to individual testimony and memory, books like Donayre's El silencio de los héroes (with Hilda Balbín Alcócer; UAP, 2009) attempt to challenge the CVR's version of events by representing the individual perspectives of soldiers. Likewise, in Chapter 2, Milton examines the work of the military's own ‘memory entrepreneurs’ – the Comisión Permanente de Historia del Ejército del Perú (Permanent Historical Commission of the Peruvian Army, CPHEP) – and their ‘official’ military account of the internal conflict, published in order to challenge the perceived misconceptions and untruths of the CVR's report.

By focusing on individual experiences and testimonies, as Milton notes, many of the authors of these works are able to obfuscate or dismiss the notion that the military engaged in widespread systemic violence, often misogynistic and highly racialised, by claiming simply to have not been witness to it. The two books compared in Chapter 3, by Lurgio Gavilán (Memorias de un soldado desconocido, IEP, 2013) and Carlos Freyre (Desde el Valle de las Esmeraldas, Estruendomudo, 2011), however, offer a more complicated account. Although produced by authors who were both soldiers at some point during the conflict, Milton argues that these works diverge somewhat from ‘official’ military accounts and represent a degree of disillusionment with the military's actions.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the manner in which military memories are curated and contested in public space in Peru, and how the military has made other interventions in public space to censor memory narratives which they perceive to be too critical. These chapters discuss a range of hitherto unknown or ignored commemorative sites, and Milton adeptly brings into dialogue the narratives displayed in public spaces with those constructed in works of theatre and in cultural artefacts.

Of course, not everything can be covered in one book; Conflicted Memory is a focused analysis of one component of post-conflict memory in Peru rather than an introduction or overview. Less is said, for example, about how Shining Path memories of the conflict are often occluded or censored from ‘acceptable’ memory discourse in Peru. Also, as Milton notes, her focus on military memories of the conflict could be interpreted as a personal desire to see military figures rehabilitated. This would be an unfair reading as Conflicted Memory provides a balanced account of the conflict in which heretofore ignored perspectives are brought to light, but not condoned. That being said, at times more could have been done, perhaps, to remind readers (particularly those new to recent Peruvian history) of the scale of the military violence during the 1980s and 1990s.

Those minor comments aside, Conflicted Memory is an original and engaging work which stands as one of the most important contributions to memory debates in Peru in recent years. It will be essential reading for any student of Peru's internal armed conflict for years to come, and will hopefully go some way towards elevating Peru as an important case (alongside the Southern Cone examples) for the study of post-violence memory in the Americas.