Spectres of Peace

Civic Participation in Northern Ireland

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12282989
AutoresVikki Bell (0000-0003-3663-1798, Goldsmiths College, UK, autor de correspondencia)
Año2004
Volumen13
Número3
Páginas403-428
Fecha de publicación2004-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial & Legal Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0964-6639 • E-ISSN: 1461-7390
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0964663904045001
OpenAlexW2135352056
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas11

Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This ‘subject’, moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the participatory ethos links the Forum’s work to much wider changes in the notion of ‘democracy’, the specificities of the Forum’s context - its role as part of the Peace process set against Northern Ireland’s history of conflict - give its work a further particular purpose with a complex temporal dimension. The new landscape is one in which the ‘call to Peace’ is foregrounded, initiating a complex relationship to what has been, what ‘is’ and what the future potentially holds. Peace, it is argued here, requires a performative call to the future, a call for a new spirit. But this new spirit is one that cannot be simply conjured, marketed and distributed like an easy sentimentality, not least because sentimentality simply ignores the present’s tie to the past. Rather, the pursuit of Peace has to be sought in the messiness of the present, and has therefore to be open to the heterogeneity of ‘the past’. Competing injunctions arise from the spirits of the past, urging those in the present to follow divergent paths. Following Derrida’s Spectres of Marx(1994), it is argued that these ghosts cannot be simply banished. As this study of the Civic Forum illustrates, how the Forum positions itself, both institutionally and procedurally, necessarily involves the negotiation of notions of past and future. The successful pursuit of Peace will be dependent upon how those in the present receive the ghosts of the past and how they can allow for their enjoining as a condition of that future’s very possibility

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Citizen journalism · Context (archaeology · Democracy · Environmental ethics · Ethnology · Ethos · Northern ireland · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Sentimentality · Sociology · Subject (documents · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty