The Trouble(s) with Transitional Justice: David Park's The Truth Commissioner

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 515-530
Author(s):  
Matt McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Gender Bias ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth Commission ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Recovery Mechanisms ◽  
Fictional Truth

David Park's The Truth Commissioner (2008) tells the story of a fictional truth commission, established in the wake of the Northern Irish Troubles. To date, one of the most striking things about Northern Ireland has been its reluctance to engage in any wide-ranging, public process for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles. The Truth Commissioner diagnoses this specific moment in Northern Irish history. This article examines Park's engagement with three key issues, often overlooked by advocates of truth telling initiatives: the emergence of multiple (often incompatible) truths, the ambiguous nature of victimhood, and the gender bias of traditional truth recovery mechanisms.

scholarly journals Truth-Justice-Reparations Interaction Effects in Transitional Justice Practice: The Case of the ‘Valech Commission’ in Chile

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATH COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Truth Commission ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Holistic Approaches ◽  
Single Instance ◽  
Justice Practice ◽  
Past State

AbstractRecent thinking and practice in transitional justice suggest that victims and societies hold indivisible, perhaps even simultaneous, rights to truth, justice and reparations after gross human rights violations. This article analyses the advantages and drawbacks of such holistic approaches to transitional justice, through a case study of Chile's second official truth commission, the ‘Valech Commission’. The article illustrates the politics of ongoing contestation about authoritarian era crimes in Latin America, showing how and why the commission was designed to deliver on certain truth-and-reparations obligations towards survivors of past state repression, while attempting to explicitly decouple truth revelations from judicial consequences. It also discusses the implications of associating truth-telling and reparations in a single instance, and in doing so contributes to debates about the potentially contradictory or counterproductive outcomes that may arise from the yoking together of truth, justice and reparations functions in transitional justice policy design.

scholarly journals From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Phelan
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was a watershed moment in Irish culture, as much as in the political sphere. Up until that moment, late twentieth-century Irish history had been dominated by the conflict that erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and Northern Irish theatre was dominated by the ‘Troubles play’—initially in the 1960s in the work of Sam Thompson, and later in plays by writers such as John Boyd, Graham Reid, and, in more complex ways, behind the formally adventurous work of Stewart Parker and Anne Devlin. However, since 1998, writers such as Owen McCafferty have inaugurated the search for a theatrical form appropriate to a post-conflict culture in which scars and divisions still remained. This chapter covers the arc of development of Northern drama over the period, leading up to some of the innovative performances of companies such as Theatre of Witness.

Transitional Justice and Protracted Accountability in Re-democratised Uruguay, 1985–2011

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUIS RONIGER
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth Commission ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Electoral Democracy ◽  
Normative Expectations ◽  
The Government

AbstractThis article analyses the protracted process by which democratised Uruguay has come to terms with its legacy of human rights violations. Central to this process has been the nature of Uruguayan transitional policies and their more recent partial unravelling. Due to the negotiated transition to electoral democracy, civilian political elites approached the transitional dilemma of balancing normative expectations and political contingency by promulgating legal immunity, for years avoiding initiatives to pursue trials or launch an official truth commission, unlike neighbouring Argentina. A constellation of national and transnational factors (including recurrent initiatives by social and political forces) eventually opened up new institutional ground for belated truth-telling and accountability for some historical wrongs – and yet, attempts to challenge the blanket legal impunity failed twice through popular consultation and in a recent parliamentary vote. Each time, the government officially projected a narrative that sacralised national consensus and reconciliation, now enshrined in two sovereign popular votes, and the adoption of a forward-looking democratic perspective.

scholarly journals Dante’s Influence on Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on the Troubles in Northern Ireland: “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “An Afterwards” and “Ugolino”

2021 ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Juan José Cogolludo Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
Irish Population ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Sectarian Violence ◽  
Epic Poem

Dante’s Divine Comedy had an enormous influence on Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre, especially from Field Work (1979) onwards. Heaney exploits the great Dantean epic poem to create a framework that allows him to contextualise some of the most painful political and social episodes in Irish history, namely the Great Hunger and the secular clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Heaney pays special attention to the problems originating from the outburst of the atavistic and sectarian violence—euphemistically known as “the Troubles”—between the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland as from 1969, causing great suffering and wreaking havoc on the Northern Irish population for decades.

scholarly journals Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah (2010) and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017): two plays about the Northern Troubles from outside of Northern Ireland

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Mikami
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Good Friday Agreement

During the three decades of the Troubles of Northern Ireland (1969-1998), a remarkable amount of plays about the Troubles was written and almost of them, it seems, had been ‘monopolised’ by (Northern) Irish playwrights. Recently, however, certain changes about this monopoly have been witnessed and those who do not claim themselves as Irish descendants have begun to choose the Northern Troubles as their themes. Also, there have been growing concerns about violence worldwide since 9.11. This article deals with two plays, Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, neither of which was written by an Irish playwright and examines whether and to what extent it is possible to say that they can transcend regional boundaries and become part of global memories in the context of the post-Good Friday Agreement and the post 9.11.

scholarly journals Against Ethnicity: Democracy, Equality, and the Northern Irish Conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Prince
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Group Identities

AbstractThe study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy, led not only to conflicts but also to some of those conflicts becoming violent. Focusing on Belfast in the summer and autumn of 1969, this article sets out how the main political actors asserted competing claims to popular sovereignty and traces how multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts became arrayed around the central one.

‘Britain's Irish Question: Britain's European Question?’ British-Irish relations in the context of European Union and The Belfast Agreement

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH MEEHAN
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Irish Question ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Eu

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.

Rough Beasts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Fennell
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human History ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Universal Morality

This book looks at Irish Gothic and horror texts, in both English and Irish, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, examining how this kind of fiction represented the cultural and political concerns of the day through the deployment of monsters, both as characters and as representative figures. Monsters disrupt both our definition of ‘history’ (as a record of past events arranged into a narrative structure) and our scientific, political, or ‘common sense’ understanding of what is possible or impossible; the monster exists outside any notion of a universal morality (or even moral relativism), and with its strange biology it complicates ideologies of gender and race. To be confronted by a monster is to witness the breakdown accepted models of reality, and plunges the subject into a nihilistic world where human action is meaningless. Since Irish history is often conceived of as a sequence of ‘ruptures’ (e.g. the Plantations, the 1641 Rebellion, the Great Famine, the Anglo-Irish War and the Troubles), monstrosity is an apt lens through which to scrutinise Irish culture. Each chapter of this book looks at a different category of monster in turn, and looks at the distinctive ways in which they rupture human history.

Commemorating bonds of Union: remembering the Ulster Special Constabulary at the National Memorial Arboretum

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
Remote Site ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Local Service ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Grant Scheme

In 2006, two acts of commemoration took place to the memory of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). One was staged in a public site of national commemoration at the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Lichfield, Staffordshire and the other was a very local service in the remote site of Mullaghfad Church, Co.Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Both of these events were state-funded under the terms of the ‘Victims and Survivors Befriending Grant Scheme’, but engaged in very different modes of remembrance. This chapter focuses on the USC memorial at the NMA as a strategic site of memory for the Ulster unionist community. Drawing upon interviews with members of the Ulster Special Constabulary Association (USCA) present at the commemoration, it explores the active role Britain plays as a physical and symbolic site of ‘respite’ for Ulster unionists. In contrast to the private, divisive nature of memorials to the USC in Northern Ireland, the NMA site enables the USCA to locate its role in the Troubles in terms of British heroism and sacrifice, alongside memorials to other UK police units. The chapter suggests that historians should look more closely at the active role Britain plays in commemorating the Northern Irish Troubles.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document