Collective memory can be manipulated; it is not engraved in stone. The British International Relations scholar Jenny Edkins has argued that political leaders use trauma and nostalgia to keep control of their citizens. Edkins’ thesis in Trauma and the Memory of Politics is that “the old Newtonian way of thinking about time persists not because we haven’t got around to re-thinking these ideas in the light of new scientific analysis, but because linear, homogeneous time suits a particular form of power – sovereign power, the power of the modern state.” “Sovereign power,” she adds, “produces and is itself produced by trauma: it provokes wars, genocides and famines.”