Abstract
This book takes as its starting point the idea that not only does the present shape how we think about the past, but that the past is not entirely mutable since experiences and interpretations of events often endure. The past, of course, is fraught with political import: perceptions of unresolved grievances and injustices are inextricably linked with questions of power by providing rationales for whose voices are heard and whose voices are silenced in the public arena. Likewise, ideas about the past are impossible to divorce from ideas about identity: we articulate who we are in the present in relation to where we have come from and the values and aspirations we wish to see sustained and fulfilled in the future. Of course, these ideas are also imbued with ethical significance and concern our adherence to the beliefs of our forebears as well as our responsibility to future generations. Stories about the past, as the historian and political philosopher Michel de Certeau pointed out, act as a bridge: they give our everyday lives meaning but also act as guides to our future decisions. As such, the politics of the past represents a juncture between everyday life and the ‘high politics’ of decision-making and policy implementation.1
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Notes
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 184.
Stef Jansen, ‘The violence of memories: Local narratives of the past after ethnic cleansing in Croatia’, Local History, 6:1 (2002), p. 84.
Lucette Valensi, ‘Traumatic events and historical consciousness: Who is in charge?’, in Historians and Social Values, edited by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), p. 195.
Ibid., p. 190.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 2010), pp. 11–12.
Rebecca Graff-McRae, Remembering and Forgetting 1916: Commemoration and Conflict in Post-Peace Process Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), p. 4.
Iwona Irwin Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (London: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 115.
Problems relating to transitions have, of course, longer historical pedigrees stretching beyond the twentieth century; see Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).
Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001); see also Ricoeur, Memory.
David Mendeloff, ‘Truth-seeking, truth-telling, and postconflict peacebuilding: Curb the enthusiasm?’, International Studies Review, 6 (2004), pp. 355–80.
Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Minerva, 1994), p. 272.
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 5.
See, in particular, Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of The Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007).
Cillian McGrattan ‘“Order out of chaos:” The politics of transitional justice’, Politics, 29:3 (2009), pp. 164–72.
W. James Booth, ‘The unforgotten: Memories of justice’, American Political Science Review, 95:4 (2001), pp. 781–2.
Greg Grandin, ‘The Instruction of great catastrophe: Truth commissions, national history, and State formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala’, American Historical Review, 110:1 (2005), pp. 46–67.
Michael Humphrey, ‘Marginalizing “victims” and “terrorists”: Modes of exclusion in the reconciliation process’, in Reconciliation after Terrorism: Strategy, Possibility or Absurdity?, edited by Judith Renner and Alexander Spencer (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 53.
Kevin Bean, The New Politics of Sinn Féin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
Cillian McGrattan, ‘Community-based restorative justice in Northern Ireland: A neo-traditionalist paradigm?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12:3 (2010), pp. 408–24.
Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan, ‘Terroristic narratives: On the (Re)-Invention of Peace in Northern Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 23:3 (2011), pp. 357–76.
Cillian McGrattan, ‘Spectres of history: Nationalist party politics and truth recovery in Northern Ireland’, Political Studies, 60:2, pp. 455–73.
Edna Longley, ‘Northern Ireland: Commemoration, elegy, forgetting’, in History and Memory in Modern Ireland, edited by Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 231.
Yehudith Auerbach and Ifat Maoz, ‘Terror, empathy and reconciliation in the Israel-Palestinian conflict’, in Reconciliation after Terrorism: Strategy, Possibility or Absurdity?, edited by Judith Renner and Alexander Spencer (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 190.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Reflections on a new ethos for Europe’, in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Praxis, edited by Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 6–7.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., pp. 7–8.
Ibid., p. 11.
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© 2013 Cillian McGrattan
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McGrattan, C. (2013). Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland. In: Memory, Politics and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291790_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291790_2
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