The politics of memory refers to how societies construct, contest, and institutionalize collective memories of historical events. Often this practice should serve political, social, or ideological purpose. As a field of study, memory politics seeks to examine how memory is shaped by power dynamics, national identity, trauma, and commemoration, and how it influences current politics and social relations. Since the politics of memory may determine the way history is written, framed and passed on, the terms history politics or politics of history are also commonly used. This field intersects with history, sociology, political science, and cultural studies.

The individual or communicative memory is short-term and personal. Collective memory and history are both long term and institutionalized. While a distinction is less clear, collective memory is more often presented as fluid, while history as static, defined by facts.

Maurice Halbwachs introduced the idea that memory is socially constructed, meaning that it is shaped by families, religions, and communities (incl. nations) rather than being purely individual. Collective memory is therefore always selective and serves group identities and social cohesion. This memory can also be influenced, which makes power relations inherit to collective memory. While memory is lived, collective, and dynamic, tied to identity and tradition, history is a critical, intellectual reconstruction of the past that often disrupts or replaces spontaneous memory. In the name of history and commemoration, modern societies create "sites of memory" (monuments, archives, rituals) to stabilize national identity amid rapid change. Similarly, the term cultural memory coined by Aleida Assmann is applied to show how states and societies selectively transmit memory across generations through education, memorials, and archives. Yet, since memory is not something static, such "sites of memory" only capture the narrative of a certain past event at one point in time and often only from one perspective, politicizing the sites.

Some historians argue that memory studies risk relativizing factual history by treating all narratives as socially constructed.

Power relations are inherent within these constructions of the past. Dominant groups often strive to impose their interpretations of reality, that bolster their own interests, as the universally accepted truth, thus establishing a mnemonic hegemony. This hegemonic control over collective memory can be a tool for maintaining existing power structures by controlling people's memory, also their momentum, their experience, and their knowledge is controlled.

Nations are not just political entities, but narrative constructs, supported by a carefully cultivated historical consciousness. Benedict Anderson argues the power of nationalism lies not in its truth but in its persuasive myth, which creates a past that binds communities together through shared memory and collective forgetting. While the shared memory forges collective identity, the suppression of traumas helps to maintain unity. This strategy of nation building brings unresolved tensions with it, mainly because marginalized groups are spoken for and also because counter narratives tend to emerge and challenge the constructed one.

However, the control being exercised over the collective memory is never absolute. Where there is power, there is resistance. Counter-narratives and counter-memories emerge from those whose experiences and recollections are marginalized or excluded from official histories. How these narratives are being expressed can take different shapes or forms, depending not only, but also on culture, gender and political climate.

To study the politics of memory and it's impacts, Johanna Mannergren et al. coined the following four mnemonic formations for analysis.