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Haunting and Transitional Justice: On Lives, Landscapes and Unresolved Pasts in Northern Ireland

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Post-Conflict Hauntings

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict ((PSCAC))

Abstract

Building on approaches to ghosts and haunting by Avery Gordon and Jacques Derrida, this chapter is concerned with practices of haunting and ghosting after conflict-related loss. This is not to suggest a focus on the occult or the paranormal, but to use these phenomena as a prism through which to understand the intersection between unresolved pasts and the transmission of trauma post-conflict. In this chapter, I argue for three conceptualisations of haunting when past traumas remain unaddressed—the haunting of lost lives, the haunting of landscape and the haunting effect of the unresolved past. The chapter focuses on Northern Ireland where the dead remain a potent and emotive means of legitimising and perpetuating the ethnonational and sectarian characteristics of political debate. Drawing out these themes, the chapter is also relevant to other transitional and post-conflict societies.

The fieldwork on which this chapter is based was made possible by the award of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career grant—AH/N001451/1—“Voice, Agency and Blame: Victimhood and the Imagined Community in Northern Ireland”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sutton Index of Deaths: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/ (accessed on 10 October 2018).

  2. 2.

    This final figure leaves out the matter of state collusion. It is now clear that the security forces and intelligence services had infiltrated both Republican and Loyalist paramilitary organisations and were complicit in multiple murders.

  3. 3.

    The Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/nisi/2006/2953/contents (accessed on 4 December 2018).

  4. 4.

    The group received 290 written submissions, 2086 standardised letters and met privately with 141 individuals and groups.

  5. 5.

    The figure of £12,000 was derived from the Irish Government’s “Remembrance Fund” and “Acknowledgement Payment” of €15,000 to the surviving spouse, their children or the parents of an individual who was either fatally injured in Ireland or who was resident in Ireland at that time.

  6. 6.

    The controversy surrounding the “Recognition Payment” closed down debate and discussion on the Report of the CGP. The Group’s legacy proposals concerning “Review and Investigation”, “Information Recovery” and “Thematic Examination” have however closely informed subsequent efforts to deal with the past, including the past facing mechanisms proposed in the Stormont House Agreement.

  7. 7.

    Approximately 30,000 people disappeared during the Argentine “dirty war”.

  8. 8.

    See, for example, https://deadcentretours.com/; http://coiste.ie/tours/; https://www.rucgcfoundation.org/ruc-gc-memorial-garden/.

  9. 9.

    Victims and Dealing with the Past, available at: https://victimsandthepast.org/ (accessed on 16 December 2018).

  10. 10.

    https://seff.org.uk/research-and-publications/ (accessed on 17 December 2018).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Cheryl Lawther

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  1. Cheryl Lawther
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  1. Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Kim Wale  & Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela  & 

  2. Department of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jeffrey Prager

  3. New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jeffrey Prager

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Lawther, C. (2020). Haunting and Transitional Justice: On Lives, Landscapes and Unresolved Pasts in Northern Ireland. In: Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_7

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