A common feature of the modern state is a past of conflict and violence. The relationship between this violence and, often, the trauma that follows it, will determine how the relationship of remembering/forgetting is going to act in the moment after the conflict. Talking about memory is not just to talk about the past. Talking about memory is also to talk about the present. Taking as examples the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda it is possible to analyze how the modern state acts through the memory practices at monumentalization, education and practices of confrontation with the past for the construction of a homogeneous society.