The Legacies of the Dead

Commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4475701
AutoresBrian Graham (University of Ulster), Yvonne Whelan (School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, England)
Ano2007
Volume25
Fascículo3
Páginas476-495
Data de publicação2007-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/d70j
OpenAlexW2130325681
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas37
Referências citadas22

The Belfast Agreement of 1998, which initiated the so-called Peace Process in Northern Ireland, was fashioned so as to avoid creating mechanisms for addressing the legacy of the past, not least the commemoration of the fatalities of the Troubles which began in 1969. In this paper we explore, first, the role of the past and practices of commemoration in unagreed societies such as Northern Ireland in which consensus appears an unlikely proposition, the focus being on inclusion and exclusion and on the role of the contested nature of a hierarchical victimhood in commemoration. Second, the discussion engages with a succession of interconnected ideas that define the spatiality and landscapes of commemoration and considers the practices and spatialization of commemorating the Troubles within the grounded reality of everyday life and within the pragmatism of politics in Northern Ireland. We argue that processes of remembering and forgetting the dead of the Troubles point, at best, to a democracy shaped by 'conflictual consensus', in which the contested heritage of victimhood both constitutes an important resource in ethnonationalist and ethnosectarian politics and undermines the consociational Belfast Agreement and its attempt to elide the burdens of the past

Democracy · Environmental ethics · Ethnology · Northern ireland · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration