There are no certain guides for rebuilding a society in the aftermath of systematic violence and genocide against one of its populations and its culture. Nevertheless, some societies address their histories more effectively than others, as found by Anika Walke, a German expat working as an assistant professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis.

For many survivors of the Holocaust, persecution began in the hometown, where greed may have swayed perceived friends and neighbors to unspeakable actions. The inhabitance of formerly Jewish-owned apartments by non-Jewish tenants in the early 1940s, specifically in Paris, provides a strong case study of this phenomenon and the basis of a research project developed by Eric Le Bourhis of the Institute for Political Sciences, Nanterre (France).

Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was created by the Vietnamese-backed government in an attempt to garner international legitimacy for the new regime. The museum, according to research fellow Timothy Williams at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University in Germany, seeks to shock visitors and demonstrate the horrific nature of the previous regime.