Suchergebnisse

The difficult transition from war to peace which has been ongoing in Northern Ireland since 1998, is now further complicated by the indeterminate status of Brexit. Drawing on three conceptualizations from first aid, triage and psychology, the paper uses the metaphor of the 'Walking Wounded' to explore how Brexit interacts with the political culture of the staggering peace process in Northern Ireland. First, understanding 'walking wounded' as injured persons of relative low priority allows us to discuss Northern Ireland as a place apart in the British body politic. Second, determining the 'walking wounded' by requesting those on the scene who may self-evacuate to do so immediately to a designated refuge, affords ways in which to understand the Republic of Ireland as a foreign policy actor and attempts to assign Northern Ireland special EU status. Third, psychologizing the 'walking wounded' as those who long for closure but do not think they can find it directs our attention to the plight of those who wanted an undiluted version of the nation state rather than the more multidirectional hybrid that is emerging into view as a result of the peace agreement and European cooperation. Finally, the paper turns to the literally walking wounded – those seriously injured in the conflict- still waiting for redress. ; The difficult transition from war to peace which has been ongoing in Northern Ireland at least since the peace agreement in 1998, is now further complicated by the indeterminate status of Brexit. Drawing on three conceptualizations from first aid, triage and psychology, the paper uses the metaphor of the 'walking wounded' to explore how Brexit interacts with the political culture of the staggering peace process in Northern Ireland. First, understanding 'walking wounded' as injured persons of relatively low priority allows us to discuss Northern Ireland as a place apart in the British body politic. Second, determining the 'walking wounded' by requesting those on the scene who may self-evacuate to do so immediately to a designated refuge, affords ways in which to understand the Republic of Ireland as a foreign policy actor and ongoing attempts to assign Northern Ireland a form of special status in relation to the EU. Third, psychologizing the 'walking wounded' as those who long for closure but do not think they can find it, directs our attention to the plight of those who wanted an undiluted version of the nation state rather than the more multidirectional hybrid that is emerging into view as a result of the peace agreement and European cooperation.

In Northern Ireland, parades have long been important carriers of politico-cultural identities and collective memories, as well as arenas of struggle and conflict. Taking as its starting point that these contests over meaning are always framed by their contexts of articulation both in temporal and spatial terms, this article examines the role of parades in the current 'post-conflict' phase of the peace process as it plays out in a particular location, namely North Belfast. Using theories of cultural and collective memory and examples from republican and loyalist parades in North Belfast, it is argued that there is fear of memory and identity collapse in particular communities on the margins of the peace process, leading to a conscious doubling of efforts to (re)articulate the hidden recesses of memory in the current transition. In this, the patterns of 'competitive commemoration' in parades should be understood both horizontally: as majority memory traditions move to minority memory positions, and vertically: in relation to the increasing dissonance between vernacular practices of conflict and the official post-conflict discourses in Northern Ireland. Central to these arguments is the recognition that parading traditions are at once presentist, competitive instruments and also emotional and embodied practices to ensure the continuity of identity. It follows that both dimensions must be recognised together, if cognitive and visceral templates of conflict are to be explained and shifted. This article applies a wide-angle memory studies lens to capture the two together and explore the changing parade-scape.

In the absence of political agreement on an overall mechanism for dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, storytelling has become a prevalent mode of addressing the legacy of violent conflict. Accordingly this paper opens up two parallel tracks of examination: one exploring the (ideally) more comprehensive and egalitarian approach to accessing the past found in forms of oral history; and the other considering the process of those stories being made into records, and the dynamics of the archive. The contested realm in which both storytelling projects and archives operate condition how they are funded, assembled, described, opened and maintained in the process of which some stories may be privileged and others marginalised or subsumed (Brown 2013). Adopting the idea that story-telling as a form of 'witnessing' is also an ethico-political act (Kurasawa 2009), the paper discusses what kind of discourses may be empowered by the online maintenance, and instant accessibility of memory in oral history archives. Drawing on a qualitative study of two story-telling projects in Northern Ireland, the paper brings out the potentialities of accounts in fostering social change and transforming cognitive patterns of conflict as well as exploring the extent to which this mode of accounting for 'life during conflict' works in producing/repeating stories that inculcate and perpetuate particular norms, practices and values. Crucially, I consider storytelling as a conduit for remembering, that is at once shaped by the absence of policies and legal frameworks, but also is shaping subsequent policies to deal with the past as can be seen in the latest political accord, which includes it as a key approach. ; ABSTRACT In the absence of a political agreement on an overall mechanism for dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, storytelling has become a prevalent mode of addressing the legacy of violent conflict. Adopting a historiographic approach, this paper opens up two related tracks of examination: one exploring the (ideally) more comprehensive and egalitarian approach to accessing the past found in storytelling projects, understood as forms of oral history; and the other considering the process of those stories being made into records, and the dynamics of the archive. Drawing on a qualitative study of two storytelling projects in Northern Ireland, the paper argues that the stories produced there are not only subjective accounts of the past and thus sources for studies of life during conflict, but are also signifi- cantly informed by contemporary policy and funding frameworks and thus are sources for the study of the present peace process. The contested realm in which both storytelling projects and archives operate condition how they are funded, assembled, described, opened and main- tained in the process of which some stories may be privileged and others marginalised or sub- sumed [Brown, C. (2013) Memory, identity and the archival paradigm: introduction to the special issue, Archival Science, 13, pp. 85–93]. Adopting the idea that storytelling as a form of 'witnessing' is also an ethico-political act [Kurasawa, F. (2009) A message in a bottle: bearing witness as a mode of transnational practice, Theory Culture Society, 26(1), pp. 92–111], the paper discusses what kind of discourses may be empowered by the online maintenance, and instant accessibility of memory in oral history archives. Crucially, the paper considers storytelling as a conduit for remembering, which is at once shaped by the absence of policies and legal frameworks, but also shapes subsequent policies to deal with the past as can be seen in the latest political accord, which includes it as a key approach. Keywords: Northern Ireland; storytelling; oral history; peace process

This introduction to the special issue start from the point that studying the politics of memory should also involve studying the governance and policies of memory: its administrations. The increasing importance of transnational and local scales in memory studies seems to have made the nation a less relevant starting point from which to conceptualize memory. Yet, states progressively attempt to administer memory. This suggests that we should focus at once on transcending methodological nationalism and bringing back the state in the study of the politics of memory. This involves thinking about administrations of memory both in terms of the processes of dispensing or aiding memory and as the state bodies that are authorized and expected to manage memory. As such, this introductory chapter is structured around two issues: (a) the interactions between transnational, national, and local scales in policy trajectories, practices, and discourses on memory and (b) the role of governance and administration in understanding memory as a category of public intervention. Both sets present a thumbnail case to illustrate the issues at stake, and taken together, they develop our ongoing reflexions on memory as a contemporary conduit for practicing politics and setting up political institutions. The ambition is for memory studies to gain a firmer understanding of the governmental and technocratic co-production of political languages for memory as they are themselves shaped in the policymaking process by (trans)national institutional practices and bureaucratic conduits. In turn, political science approaches on the whole may gain from a firmer appreciation and conceptualization of the structures and carriers of collective memory in and across particular political cultures, which may also lead to more reflexive policy instrumentation and programming in contemporary societies trying to deal in and with the past.