Suchergebnisse

In marked contrast to literary, historical and cultural studies, there has been a limited engagement with the concepts and politics of trauma by political science and peacebuilding research. This book explores the debate on trauma and peacebuilding and presents the challenges for democratization that the politics of trauma present in transitional periods. It demonstrates how ideas about reconciliation are filtered through ideological lenses and become new ways of articulating communal and ethno-nationalist sentiments. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Iris Marion Young and with specific reference to the Northern Irish transition, it argues for a shift in focus from the representation of trauma towards its reception and calls for a more substantive approach to the study of democracy and post-conflict peacebuilding. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of peace and conflict studies, ethnic and nationalism studies, transitional justice studies, gender studies, Irish politics, nationalism and ethnicity.--

The question of how to move beyond contentious pasts exercises societies across the globe. Focusing on Northern Ireland, this book examines how historical injustices continue to haunt contemporary lives, and how institutional and juridical approaches to 'dealing' with the past often give way to a silencing consensus or re-marginalising victims.

This article argues that it is possible to distinguish between a narrative understanding that frames the historical outbreak of the Northern Irish conflict in either structuralist or agential terms. Both of these discursive starting points are fraught with political implications: the former suggests that in the absence of (continuing) fundamental transformation(s) some of the causes of the conflict remain – and may return; the latter suggests that conflict through the proxy of History is overdetermined and that the focus on abstract narratives obscures the choices and omissions that allowed the violence to persist for so long. The article is interested less in the historical verifiability of the structuralist or agential claims than in how those problematics are reflected in the secondary literature. As such, I map two versions of the structuralist narrative – a stronger and a weaker case – and describe an alternative, agential perspective. The paper concludes with an outline of how attention to personal histories and memoirs may provide new ways of incorporating (and troubling) both approaches. ; Este artigo argumenta que é possível distinguir entre narrativas históricas que situam a eclosão do conflito na Irlanda do Norte em termos das suas estruturas ou dos seus agentes. Ambas os discursos têm implicações políticas profundas: o primeiro aponta que na ausência (continuada) de mudanças de fundo algumas das causas do conflito permanecem – e podem ressurgir; o segundo sugere que o conflito visto através do olhar da História é sobredeterminado e que o foco em narrativas abstratas obscurece as escolhas e omissões que possibilitaram que a violência persistisse durante tanto tempo. Este artigo toma com objeto não a probidade histórica destes dois argumentos, mas sim a forma como estes se refletem na literatura secundária. Neste sentido, o artigo analisa duas versões da narrativa estruturalista – uma mais forte e outra mais matizada – e descreve uma alternativa, centrada na perspetiva dos agentes. Como conclusão, é ...