Remembering can be controversial. For the past 13 years, Americans have gathered at Ground Zero in New York on 9/11. Nothing too scandalous there. But that act became tendentious when we built a memorial – and then, this year, a museum – to recall the tragedy.

It’s easy to find fault with this type of tangible remembrance. How, you may ask, can a single artistic representation possibly encompass searing brutality, grief, horror, and loss? Is it morally appropriate for perpetrator governments or their successors to build these monuments? Is it ethical to construct sites that attract gawking tourists? These uncomfortable questions have prompted many to argue that remembrance days, educational programs, and empty spaces specifically designated for commemoration are better than physical memorials. But that argument ignores an important benefit of the memorial: No matter how they look, they have a permanence that an empty space or an educational program does not. And that permanence sends a powerful message – that the memory of the tragedy won’t be ephemeral.

That fact doesn’t make it any easier to design a memorial that’s universally pleasing. New York’s 9/11 Memorial and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe show how hard it can be to construct an appropriate, effective memorial. The first challenge they illustrate: How to navigate the trade-off between information and aesthetics. Too many plaques, for instance, overwhelm the aesthetic impact of a place, but too little information leaves observers to wonder what’s being commemorated. This is the case with the Holocaust memorial. It consists of a field of massive gray steles designed to communicate sorrow, accompanied by an underground information center. But the information center is difficult to find, and the memorial’s title doesn’t mention who persecuted the Jews or even which Jews were murdered, reducing this information to the assumption that “everybody knows.”

So memorials, regardless of their flaws, are critical in sustaining attention paid to past tragedies. Their power, in other words, is in their permanence.

The need to balance form with education is made harder by the fact that visitors have different degrees of knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and mother tongues. Architecture may communicate the past better than a plaque can, but successful memorials must still incorporate both design and data. The 9/11 Memorial sought to solve this problem by building a museum next to the memorial, but this only caused a clash: A few months ago, an interfaith council objected to one of the museum’s films, saying that the short movie, designed to educate visitors about Al Qaeda, doesn’t clearly differentiate between radical jihadists and ordinary Muslims.

This still leaves maybe the biggest dilemma in headlines: How should memorials engage visitors? The Holocaust and 9/11 memorials, again, demonstrate this difficulty. Critics argue that the Holocaust memorial, with its rectilinear stele arrangement, has ineffective artistic engagement, partly because of how hard it is to find the accompanying information center, and partly because many of the steles are now beginning to crumble. There’s also the issue of how the memorial is used as a park in which children (and adults, too) play hide-and-seek and sit on smaller steles. In other words, it’s not entirely clear whether the memorial is supposed to be a site of fun or solemnity.

Similarly, the 9/11 Memorial is still often criticized for being “given over to multimedia flash”: With its bagpipe music, gift shop, and jam-packed displays, the memorial is more likely to leave visitors confused than moved. Moreover, there’s been the even more recent snafu over selfies—should visitors be taking smiling photos of themselves at a solemn memorial? Some visitors, whether at the Holocaust memorial or 9/11 Memorial, argue that selfies are a form of tribute; they put people into a larger context. But for others, this tragedy tourism is disrespectful.

These concerns are real and valid. But we can’t let them obscure the reality that constructing a memorial is still a positive and significant step toward remembrance. For instance, Berlin’s Memorial for the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered in National Socialism wasn’t finished until 2012, though it’s for a tragedy that occurred in the 1940s. This delay was due in large part to the fact that although the Roma Genocide, or Porajmos, killed nearly one quarter of Europe’s entire Roma community, many people hadn’t heard of the Porajmos. It wasn’t until 1982 that the German government acknowledged that Roma and Sinti were persecuted for racial reasons. Before then policy held that they had been killed for asocial behavior. By constructing a permanent Porajmos memorial (within view of the Reichstag, no less), the government is stating that it accepts past guilt and will offer future support to the Roma. So memorials, regardless of their flaws, are critical in sustaining attention paid to past tragedies. (And seeing as how Roma still face government-sanctioned prejudice in some of the very places where their relatives were killed, and how European Jews are facing a refueled anti-Semitism in what has been called the “worst times since the Nazi era,” memorials are key for making sure we don’t forget.) Their power, in other words, is in their permanence.

They’re living lessons that promote non-recurrence of long-ago conflicts, as well as of recent tragedies.

Clearly, it’s difficult to construct a memorial that pleases everyone: governments, communities being honored, and outside observers, while simultaneously balancing artistry with information.  Memorials shouldn’t be prioritized above victims’ needs, nor should they be created without first consulting the victims themselves. “Failed” monuments abound. Examples such as Marcel Breuer’s aborted Roosevelt Memorial from the 1960s, Yemen’s Sana’a suicide bombing memorial from 2012, and Hungary’s arguably revisionist World War II memorial from this year shine a light on how difficult it is to combine the ingredients needed to create a memorial that’s accurate, easily interpreted, and respectful.

With artistic, historical, and educational integrity, however, memorials are powerful reminders that the darker chapters of the past mustn’t be repeated. They’re living lessons that promote non-recurrence of long-ago conflicts, as well as of recent tragedies.

About the Author

Claire Greenstein

Claire Greenstein is a Ph.D. student in comparative politics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her prior research has focused mainly on Europe, and her research interests include transitional justice and memory politics.

Cutting deals with the enemy is a part of American – and Western – history. America has negotiated with terrorists and guerrilla fighters since the days of William Howard Taft. The UK, too, has conferred with the violent Irish Republican Army and Spain with its domestic terror group ETA.

But some policy pundits argue that Qatar’s latest negotiating behavior is different. Sinister, even. In the past few weeks, Qatar successfully brokered the release of U.S. reporter Theo Curtis and U.S. service man Bowe Bergdahl from the Al Qaeda affiliated Jabhat Al Nusra and the Taliban. Along with the homecoming celebrations came an uneasiness about Qatari motivations, and the nature of those terrorist organization relationships. Aside from these two examples, Qatar’s close relationship with Hamas concerns many. Some of the commentary on these issues makes some valid points that need to be answered, while some are faintly ludicrous. So let’s look at the facts.

The leader of Hamas has long been based in Doha, and Qatar seemed to play an important role in recent discussions regarding ceasefires in Israel. Qatar also has long-held a panoply of links to moderate Muslim Brotherhood associated groups throughout the Middle East. Particularly notable, for example, is Qatar’s hosting since 1961 of one of the leading Brotherhood Imams: Yusuf Al Qaradawi. He vastly expanded his influence under Qatari auspices using Al Jazeera as a vehicle to reach millions of Arabs. Qatar is also one of two states where the austere creed of Salafi, Wahhabi Islam prevails; the other is Saudi Arabia. To some, such links and associations are a context of enough circumstantial evidence to condemn Qatar as some kind of terrorist financier.

But this caricature of Qatar as a Machiavellian nation, secretly and actively supporting terrorism, just does not chime with the reality of the state.

But this caricature of Qatar as a Machiavellian nation, secretly and actively supporting terrorism, just does not chime with the reality of the state. Its leadership in recent decades has been arguably the most liberalizing in the Arab Middle East, though granted that’s hardly a difficult title to claim.

When offered several choices of how to reform Qatar’s schools by US think-tank the RAND Corporation, Qatar’s leadership chose the option with the deepest changes explicitly modelled on the US school system. In higher education, six US and three other Western Universities have been established in Doha grafting a font of predominantly US soft power onto Qatari society providing the option of a liberal arts education.

Related: Why did other Gulf states turn their back on Qatar?

What’s more, Qatar is home to one of the most iconic and powerful female role models in the Middle East. Sheikha Moza, the wife of the former Emir and the mother of the current Emir, is a highly visible stateswoman and the only Gulf first lady to be regularly seen. She is the founder and driving force behind the Education City project (where most Western universities are housed) as well as a raft of domestic social policies and charitable foundations, such as the WISE education awards, seen as the Nobel prize of the education world.

Nor should it be forgotten that Qatar actively cultivated relations with Israel in the early 1990s. There was an Israel trade office in Doha from 1996 to the late 2000s as Qatar actively sought (but eventually failed) to boost relations, such as by selling gas to the Jewish state.

Unless it is being suggested that Qatar undertook these efforts as some kind of a divisionary tactic, which is surely a ludicrous notion, it is difficult to peg Qatar as some kind of retrograde, terrorist-supporting state.

What is more likely is that Qatar wants to use its role with the likes of the Taliban and Jabhat Al Nusra as political gambits to reinforce the critical niche role that it can fulfil for important international allies. In a region that sees a major conflict every decade and where Qatar is a tiny, relatively intrinsically defenceless state, boxed in by historically belligerent, far larger states – Saudi Arabia and Iran – the central tenet of Qatar’s modern foreign policy has been to make the state as important as possible to as wide a range of important actors as possible.

Of course, these policy underpinnings don’t explain the actions and motivations of all Qataris. It is entirely possible if not likely, as some reports have noted, that there are individual Qataris not connected to the government that actively support groups like ISIS and who take advantage of lax Qatari financial controls. Indeed, the US Government has criticized the Gulf States including Qatar for not controlling personally collected, charitable money. Qatari authorities must do more to stop and sanction these individuals.

Some would sensibly counter, however, that the level of support or the freedom that states like Qatar show some apparent terrorist financiers indicates that, secretly, they support their cause. While it is possible that there may be some sympathisers in the elite (there was an example of this in the 1990s, see this summary) there are more persuasive explanations.

Related: How Qatar can save their 2022 World Cup bid

To understand the Qatari perspective, you need a realistic view of the Middle East. Hamas may be a violent terrorist organisation by most definitions, but is also an elected political group that commands significant support. Though Qatar’s support facilitates the group, it is a fact on the ground that is not changing with or without Qatar’s help. That many in the Middle East see Hamas as engaging in resistance with what little means they have against one of the most advanced militaries in the world further complicates the issue.

The worst that can then be said of Qatar is that it is supporting regional groups to augment its own regional influence, in which case it joins the list including all Middle Eastern and Western countries trying to do exactly that.

So too with Jabhat Al Nusra. A reprehensible terrorist group it may be by most definitions, but it is often understood as representing a significant force on the ground: it is an actor that needs to be reckoned with.

None of this is an attempt to excuse terrorism or to try to claim that, for example, Hamas is anything other than a terrorist group. But it is to say that there are great swathes of people who would disagree with that characterisation and therefore it is pragmatic in a Kissinger-esque way to deal with the realities as we find them not as we wish they were.

The overarching tone of Qatar’s domestic and foreign policies of recent decades suggests that its interaction with these groups stems not from a blood-thirsty desire to wage war to facilitate the shelling of Israelis. Instead, Qatar acknowledges the realities that, for example, Hamas, like it or not, is a powerful and popular actor in the central conflict of the Arab world or that with more extreme groups like Nusra, it is better to have a contact with them than not.

Not only can these contacts contribute to releasing hostages – without ransoms being paid in this case – but demonstrably without an ideological motivation to support killing, Qatar must be using these links for a future political process. The worst that can then be said of Qatar is that it is supporting regional groups to augment its own regional influence, in which case it joins the list including all Middle Eastern and Western countries trying to do exactly that.

About the Author

David B. Roberts

Dr. Roberts is a Lecturer at King’s College London. His book Qatar: Securing the Global Ambitions of a City State will be published in 2014.

For most of my life, the mayor of my hometown – Fairburn, Georgia – was Betty Hannah, a white woman. But since Fairburn is about 20 miles outside of Atlanta, that seemed bound to change eventually: Black residents like my mother and I could always look down the road to a major American capital that has, for more than a generation, been run by a black mayor, district attorney, police chief, and city council. In 2009, the year I turned 31, Mario Avery was elected Fairburn’s first black mayor.

Ferguson, Missouri too, is a town with a history of white-only governance, and in close proximity to a place where black residents do have political power: Country Club Hills, a city with a black mayor, black police chief and predominantly black city council. And so, while I reported on the Michael Brown shooting and unrest in Ferguson this summer, I wondered how a place that looked so similar to my hometown could be so different – how the black people who make up a majority of the city of Ferguson could wield so little power.

The story of how Fairburn managed to take similar historical ingredients and cook up an entirely different future could hold lessons for Ferguson – and all of the other towns like it across the country.

But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the numbers that seem key to the modern power asymmetries that exist among black residents in Ferguson, and yet not in Fairburn.

Like Ferguson, my hometown started as a train stop in the 1800s. Both towns are about 70 percent black and 30 percent white, according to the most recent Census data. The majority of residents (more than 80 percent) are high school graduates, and nearly one-quarter are college educated. At least 60 percent are homeowners.

But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the numbers that seem key to the modern power asymmetries that exist among black residents in Ferguson, and yet not in Fairburn.

More: How to avoid the next Ferguson

Fairburn is faring better economically. The median income in my hometown is about $13,000 higher, and the home values are about $47,000 higher. Unemployment in Ferguson is about seven points higher than in Fairburn (14.3 percent to 7.4 percent).

Population changes may also be key to the divergence of these stories: Fairburn has had a population explosion in the past decade – swelling from about 5,400 residents in 2000 to nearly 13,700 today, bringing new voices to the conversation. Ferguson’s population, which has hovered at around 21,000, has actually dipped slightly in recent years.

Another statistic that sticks out: Seventy-four percent of businesses in Fairburn are black-owned, according to the most recent Census; Ferguson had no such data available. (I did notice that a lot of the looting that occurred during the protests in Ferguson happened to stores that were not black-owned, and that black-owned businesses in that area proclaimed their status in spray paint in plywood boards covering their windows.)

That three of four businesses in Fairburn are black-owned was not always the case. But as the population grew and demographics shifted, those who came into my hometown took ownership of their community – including as entrepreneurs.

Having a financial stake in a town beyond homeownership creates a sense of investment in a community – and a can catalyze civic engagement.

It seems logical, then, that Fairburn’s voters are also more engaged in city elections. Last November, 34 percent of the city’s registered voters showed up, despite having an uncontested mayoral race. That’s more than three times the turnout in Ferguson’s last city elections in April 2013 (11 percent).

Get the Weekly Wonk sent straight to your inbox.

But perhaps this summer’s shooting served as a wakeup call for black residents in Ferguson. For many of them, oppression has become a way of life.  As I interviewed the residents of Ferguson, I noticed that many had stories of regular police harassment, or being jailed for days or weeks for what seemed to be minor infractions. I was struck by how routine their stories were, and how casually they recounted them.

I simply could not imagine such a thing being accepted as commonplace in Fairburn.

So, what happened here? What made the people in my hometown seize their civic responsibility and forge a dramatically different future?

For those questions, I turned to Mayor Avery. He suggested that Fairburn’s population explosion and geography played a big role: The influx of new Fairburn residents were determined to replicate the changes they saw in neighboring cities. And Fairburn’s proximity to Atlanta, the seat of the civil rights movement, is a powerful motivator. Because Fairburn sits in the shadow of that legacy, it is entwined and influenced by that history in a way that Ferguson may not be.

A wake-up call can work just as well as a population explosion.

And yet, Avery said he would be surprised if the situation in Ferguson doesn’t spark change in that community. A wake-up call can work just as well as a population explosion.

“I’d be totally amazed if, when the dust settles, the people don’t start demanding services and representation from people who are serious about making things happen,” Avery said. “People are going to start asking, ‘What is the city doing to show that we’re trying to make progress?’ You’re a city that nobody knew a year ago. You become a target when you become visible.”

Before I left, I saw signs that Ferguson could be ready to change. The sustained peaceful protests by many who lived in the community showed a commitment to addressing some of the issues raised by Brown’s death: the low voter turnout and absence of black candidates on the municipal ballot; the lack of black police officers patrolling their community; the need for more local jobs and job training programs for the city’s young people.

Some Ferguson residents have said they are encouraged by the Department of Justice’s involvement in the Brown investigation and the announcement of an additional federal probe into policing practices in Ferguson, a move affirmed by the city’s leaders. National support can go a long way towards sustaining momentum.

As I left Ferguson in late August, I learned that city leaders had to postpone their council meeting, citing “increased interest from residents wishing to attend,” to give the city time to find a bigger venue. The meeting, held a month after Michael Brown’s death, was standing-room only and a parade of angry and frustrated residents took their leaders to task for three hours.

Sometimes, the first step towards change is taking a look at a person – or place – where that change has become possible. In Fairburn, many of the important people in my childhood world had black faces. Like my favorite librarian – a black man who, along with my mother, encouraged my love for books. I was in fourth grade when I had my first black teacher.

These things matter because they allow a group to understand what is possible for them. The fate of Fairburn is still possible for the people of Ferguson.

About the Author

Errin Whack

Errin Whack is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who writes about culture and politics. She also serves as Vice President of Print for the National Association of Black Journalists.

Uber has pulled off what few others can these days: The beloved car service (if I’m allowed to describe it so prosaically) has united politicians of all persuasions. Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians are all vying to outdo each other in portraying the popular company, and its political struggles to avoid regulatory strangulation, as a poignant validation of their worldview.

Uber last month hired David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and White House adviser, to direct its “campaign” against “Big Taxi” and local transportation regulators across the country. At the same time, conservative Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist championed Uber even though it is the darling of harried urbanites in Democratic enclaves like San Francisco and New York City.

The Republican Party is embracing Uber’s popularity in such hostile jurisdictions with a plaintive “See, this is what we have been complaining about all along” pitch, complete with a “petition in support of innovative companies like Uber.” Republicans understandably salivate at the sight of liberals, for once, railing against government overreach–excessive licensing requirements, taxes, and safety regulations–threatening a service they love. Is it too much of a stretch to hope that these ride-share fans might rise up to oppose similar government-imposed obstacles facing plenty of other American businesses–power utilities, financial companies, industrial manufacturers, and other “companies like Uber”?

The big regulatory clashes of the Internet era haven’t produced new thinking or conceptual breakthroughs for how to regulate other areas of the economy.

Good luck with that. The big regulatory clashes of the Internet era–the various iterations of net neutrality, the Microsoft antitrust case, the disputes over taxing online commerce, the Napster music download battles, the recent Aereo TV Supreme Court case, and the current fight over how to regulate Uber, Airbnb, and other “sharing economy” firms–haven’t produced new thinking or conceptual breakthroughs for how to regulate other areas of the economy.

Instead, these “new economy” fights have deepened the dysfunction of our very old political system. These disputes have typically involved definitional squabbles: Is Uber merely another limo company? Was Aereo’s TV streaming service more akin to your old VCR or a rogue cable company? Disrupting technologies also render obsolete existing regulatory approaches that then become difficult to dismantle or update. And so Internet-era fights stand out for their brazen hypocrisy, cynicism, and intellectual inconsistency.

More: How Google advertising is changing political advertising

Take Uber. It’s hard to imagine Republicans cheering the company on if, instead of stealing market share from local union-controlled monopolies, it was stealing market share from a handful of large, publicly traded national taxi companies that had invested heavily in their infrastructure while satisfying regulations the new entrant was trying to avoid.

That alternative scenario is pretty much how things stand in the telecom sector, where Republicans have generally defended the prerogatives of incumbent players against regulators and new competitors preaching “net neutrality” (the principle that owners of the Internet’s pipes or airwaves cannot make separate deals with content providers on price or speed depending on their traffic volume or other considerations, but must treat everyone equally). When it comes to the long-running net neutrality battles at the FCC and in the courts, the GOP has been far more sympathetic to what economists call the “stranded costs” and property rights of established incumbents who built their businesses the old-fashioned way.

But conservatives aren’t alone in their hypocrisy, or semantic creativity, when it comes to Uber. Liberal Uber lovers, instead of addressing cities’ burdensome transport regulations head-on, are more comfortable arguing that the company doesn’t belong in the same category as those old yellow taxis and limo companies. Uber, you see, is a technology company!

Get the Weekly Wonk sent straight to your inbox.

This sort of semantic nonsense has been a staple of all Internet regulatory fights–and, on the business side, of the hype used to try to justify stratospheric valuations for dot-coms during the Internet bubble early on. For a long time Internet enthusiasts felt it was OK to “share” copyrighted music and films online widely, since it was somehow different than old school piracy. And if you think Tesla shouldn’t be forced to sell their cars through third-party dealers, arguing that it’s a tech company that shouldn’t be subject to the old rules is far easier than seeking to take on the anachronistic and anti-consumer laws hurting all car companies. Better to create a loophole or carve-out for the new players than to bother modernizing the entire system.

The transformation of numerous industries by nimble players leveraging formidable information technologies on behalf of consumers is to be celebrated, but not to the point of pretending that things that are aren’t, or that aren’t are.

For years, online retailers like Amazon benefited from the dubious notion that taxing online sales would stifle the development of the Internet, and that online retailers, because they are primarily tech companies, shouldn’t be subject to those pesky burdens imposed on brick-and-mortar retailers. I am a huge fan of Amazon, but it is unfair to its competitors in the physical world (not to mention to state revenues) for my purchase of shoes on the site to be treated as some mystical high-tech event that is not, contrary to all appearances, a retail transaction.

The “sharing economy” moniker, as applied to the likes of Uber and Airbnb, is itself a brilliant but disingenuous fiction. What exactly am I “sharing” in an Uber transaction? As far as I can tell, the company owners are “sharing” with me a driver it has hired so long as I pay a certain amount of money to get from Point A to Point B. The service is good and prompt, but I am not sure what is being “shared” that my community’s yellow cab service doesn’t also “share” with me. Similarly, calling Airbnb part of the “sharing economy” seduces us into thinking it’s so different from everything that has come before it. But isn’t the underlying transaction involved–me paying you $100 to rent a room for the night–basically the same one I engage in if I book a hotel room on Expedia?

So let’s get real. The transformation of numerous industries by nimble players leveraging formidable information technologies on behalf of consumers is to be celebrated, but not to the point of pretending that things that are aren’t, or that aren’t are. There’s plenty of that already taking place in our traditional politics.

This article originally appeared on Zócalo Public Square.

About the Author

Andrés Martinez

Andrés Martinez is New America's editorial director for Future Tense. He is also the editorial director of Zócalo Public Square, and professor of practice at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.