‘Truth recovery’ and the role of the security forces in the Northern Ireland Troubles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The State ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Past ◽  
British State ◽  
Peace And Reconciliation

In light of the controversies that remain about Bloody Sunday and other violent episodes involving the state, this chapter examines three important aspects to the debate around truth recovery and the role of the Security Forces in the Troubles. First, it asks what role the Security Forces played in the conflict according to official state narratives. Second, it examines the apparent obfuscation of security forces’ experiences by an anti-state republican agenda. Here the chapter makes the case that republicans do this because of a need to reinforce tropes of meaning that preserve the integrity of the killings carried out by the Provisional IRA, while justifying continued hostility to the British state as well as their commitment to a peace process. Lastly, the chapter asks what consequences these official state and anti-state representations of the past have had on attempts to ‘give a voice’ to Security Forces victims (particularly those from Britain) amidst the apparent obfuscating of terrorist violence. By marginalising the experiences of those who soldiered during the Troubles we risk skewing our understanding of the three dimensional nature of the conflict and further postponing the opportunities to move towards meaningful peace and reconciliation.

scholarly journals Photographs and “Truth” during the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1969–72

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Bloody Sunday ◽  
British State

AbstractThis article explores how photographs were used as evidence during the early Northern Ireland Troubles. In particular, it focuses on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the article shows how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. The study shows the importance of exploring the processes and mechanisms through which the state made sense of Northern Ireland to understand how causal accounts of conflict were produced and authenticated—and how, in turn, those explanatory regimes shaped the policies of the British state and the responses of local communities, and became embedded in historical writing on the Troubles.

Twenty Years after: Statute of Limitations and the Asymmetric Burdens of Justice in Northern Ireland and Post-war Germany

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
C K Martin Chung
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Balanced Approach ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
British State ◽  
Reconciliation Process

Abstract In 2018, that is 20 years after the conclusion of the Belfast Agreement ending the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the ‘Troubles’, the UK Government started a consultation on dealing with its legacy. The House of Commons Defence Committee proposes the enactment of a statute of limitations to shield veterans from further investigations into Troubles-related crimes. It would represent a ‘balanced’ approach to justice, as some paramilitary combatants had also received de facto amnesty through various schemes. This article argues that given the involvement of the British state in the historical conflict, a ‘balanced’ approach to dealing with the past is inadequate. Drawing on parallel parliamentary debates in Germany that began around 1965, that is also 20 years after the end of conflict, the article makes the case that an asymmetric approach is both promising and necessary for the reconciliation process to move forward.

scholarly journals Island cities: the case of Belfast, Northern Ireland

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-8
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Royle
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
The Future ◽  
Briefing Document

Abstract The paper considers Belfast as an ‘island city’ with reference to issues of identity and economy and especially in connection with a series of statements from the ‘Futures of Islands’ briefing document prepared for the IGU’s Commission on Islands meeting in Kraków in August 2014. Belfast as a contested space, a hybrid British/Irish city on the island of Ireland, exemplifies well how ‘understandings of the past condition the future’, whilst the Belfast Agreement which brought the Northern Ireland peace process to its culmination after decades of violence known as the ‘Troubles’ speaks to ‘island ways of knowing, of comprehending problems - and their solutions’. Finally, Belfast certainly demonstrates that ‘island peoples shape their contested futures’

scholarly journals Memory, Trauma and Forgetting in Northern Irish Drama

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Anthony Roche
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Violent Incident ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Bloody Sunday

The ethical exhortation ‘not to forget’ runs the risk of ‘a memory that would never forget anything’. At the other extreme is the no less dangerous risk of total amnesia, an erasure of the past that immediately suggests Freud and the return of the repressed. The complex balance to be found between memory and forgetting is particularly fraught in Northern Ireland and the politics of how the past is to be negotiated in the current post peace process climate. I propose to look at this subject in relation to the trauma engendered by decades of violence in two Northern Irish plays: Quietly (2012) by Owen McCafferty, set in the post peace process climate of 2009 but harking back to a violent incident in the same location thirty-five years earlier; and Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988), a canonical play about one of the central events in ‘the Troubles’, Bloody Sunday of 30 January 1972, but set more than a decade later.

Factors that Impede or Facilitate Post-Conflict Justice Mechanisms?

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn L. Rothe ◽  
Scott Maggard
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The State ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Empirical Testing ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict

This article provides an overview of post-conflict justice (PCJ) as well as a detailed analysis of factors that impede or facilitate the implementation of mechanisms to address the atrocities of a conflict. Grounded in an extensive new dataset, developed over the past three years, covering all conflicts in Africa between 1946 and 2009, we extend previous research by including empirical testing of previously untested assumptions and variables impacting PCJ, most notably, the role of power, politics, economics, and geo-strategic interests at the state and international political levels as well as combining previously tested variables amongst and between each other. Further, the aspects of PCJ, including conflicts where mechanisms were not deployed are included in the analysis along with those coded as symbolic in nature. We conclude by discussing the pragmatic issues associated with testing the concept of realpolitik and policy implications based on our analysis.

scholarly journals THE TROUBLES WITH A LOWER CASE t: UNDERGRADUATES AND BELFAST'S DIFFICULT HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 219-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean O'Connell
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Lower Case ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

2019 ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Andrew Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
2008 Presidential Election ◽  
Post Conflict

After Clinton’s second term in office ended, President George W Bush moved the Special Envoy to Northern Ireland to the State Department, but his Envoys, led by Richard Haass and Mitchell Reiss, were no less engaged in Northern Irish affairs as the political figures there sought to create a functional government at Stormont Parliament Buildings. A series of significant obstacles emerged, but the Northern Ireland Assembly finally formed in 2007 before Bush left office. He was succeeded by President Barack Obama who had little interest in Northern Ireland but Obama’s initial Secretary of State, former Senator Hillary Clinton, was well-versed in Northern Irish issues. This chapter also examines the role of Northern Ireland in the 2008 Democratic Primary contest and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 Presidential Election.

scholarly journals Lack of Group Support and Burnout Syndrome in Workers of the State Security Forces and Corps: Moderating Role of Neuroticism

Medicina ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (9) ◽  
pp. 536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farfán ◽  
Peña ◽  
Topa
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
The State ◽  
Burnout Syndrome ◽  
Group Support ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Personal Fulfillment ◽  
Moderating Role

: Background and Objectives: This research analyzes the relationship between the lack of group support and burnout syndrome in workers of the State Security Forces and Corps, considering the role of personality traits in this relationship. In particular, it is hypothesized that neuroticism will moderate this relationship. Materials and Methods: Participants were 237 workers from the State Security Forces and Corps dedicated to tasks of citizen security. Results: The results show that neuroticism moderates the relationship between lack of group support and the three components of the burnout syndrome: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal fulfillment. Conclusions: The findings are discussed, suggesting intervention strategies for the improvement of the agents’ personal well-being.

Theories of International Relations and Northern Ireland

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
The World

The peace process in Northern Ireland is associated with the signing of the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, the arduous and lengthy implementation of this Agreement, and the continuing sectarianism in Northern Ireland. Despite the numerous and various studies about this case, no collection of scholarly analysis to date has attempted to assess a wide variety of theories prominent in International Relations (IR) that relate directly to the conflict in Northern Ireland, the peace process, and the challenges to consolidating peace after an agreement. IR scholars have recently written about and debated issues related to paradigms, border settlement and peace, the need to provide security and disarm combatants, the role of agents and ideas, gender and security, transnational movements and actors, the role of religions and religious institutions, the role of regional international organizations, private sector promotion of peace processes, economic aid and peacebuilding, the emergence of complex cooperation even in the world of egoists, and the need for reconciliation in conflict torn societies. How do the theories associated with these issues apply in the context of Northern Ireland’s peace process? Theories of International Relations and Northern Ireland explores primarily middle-range theories of International Relations and examines these theories in the context of the important case of Northern Ireland.

The Fall and Rise of Church and State? Religious History, Politics and the State in Britain, 1961–2011

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 491-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Grimley
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
State Relations ◽  
British State

In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The prime minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.

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