Denial, Silence and the Politics of the Past: Unpicking the Opposition to Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland

Lawther, Cheryl

doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijs029

Cited by 38 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Hence, the existence of silence seemingly undermines the very raison d’être of transitional justice, particularly when it is viewed as synonymous with impunity, denial and amnesia (Alija Fernández and Martin-Ortega, 2017: 536; Lambright, 2015: 1; Üngör and Adler, 2017: 614). In her work on Northern Ireland, for example, Lawther (2012: 169) notes that ‘Seeking to preserve their narratives of the past, many unionists have implicitly and explicitly met calls for truth with silence’.…”

Section: Silence and Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Finding a Voice: Silence and its Significance for Transitional Justice

Clark

2019

Social & Legal Studies

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On the surface at least, silence appears to have no obvious or legitimate place within transitional justice. The latter is about voice and about truth-telling, about creating a factual record of what happened. The core aim of the article, however, is to demonstrate that silence is highly relevant to transitional justice. To develop this argument, it explores two possible and interrelated functions of silence – as a form of resistance and as a survival strategy. Conceptualizing silence as a form of absence, and emphasizing a dialectical relationship between silence as being and becoming, the article underlines the transformative possibilities of silence and their significance for transitional justice. In particular, silence can aid in the development of more agentic and contextually sensitive ways of dealing with the past. A major challenge for transitional justice, thus, is to find ways of allowing silence to ‘speak’.

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Section: Silence and Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Finding a Voice: Silence and its Significance for Transitional Justice

Clark

2019

Social & Legal Studies

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“…Moreover, victimhood is inevitably mapped onto competing narratives of community, nation and the contested past. Particularly in the postconflict context, where imagined versions of the past can become reified and deified by its key players, 'imagined victims' and by extension, 'imagined offenders' shape the construction of imagined political communities (Lawther, 2010(Lawther, , 2013Walklate, 2007). As regards transitional justice and truth commissions, one-dimensional victim and perpetrator identity positions can be most clearly seen in respect to the SATRC.…”

Section: Truth Commissions and The Making Of Victimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Cast of the Past’: Truth Commissions and the Making and Marginalization of Identity

Lawther

2017

Ethnopolitics

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While truth commissions have become the 'go to' response in the aftermath of violent conflict and human rights abuses, serious critical discussion on the extent to which commissions have tended to shape and reify the identities of victims and perpetrators and obscures the reality of structural culpability is only tentatively emerging in the field. Drawing on literature from the field of transitional justice, this article critically interrogates the relationship between truth commissions and the three key constituencies of victims, perpetrators and structural actors. It suggests that binary oppositions between victims and perpetrators are frequently privileged, resulting in hierarchal conceptions of innocent victims and guilty perpetrators. These polarized categories fail to reflect the complexity of conflict and promote easy and uncritical allocations of blame and responsibility. It also argues that the capacity of truth commissions to engage with structural actors and the structural causes of conflict is limited due to the influence of human rights and criminal justice on transitional justice and an individualized focus on violations of civil and political rights. An impunity gap is thus created, eliding broader patterns of institutional complicity and responsibility for structural violence, while the focus on civil and political rights violations creates further hierarchies of harm and hierarchies of victimisation. The paper concludes that greater recognition of the complexity of identity and involvement in conflict is required to provide a more honest reflection on the past and a more sustainable link between truth telling and peace building.

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“…As Oberschall (2007) rightly identifies in relation to what he calls ‘double victim syndrome’, claims to in-group victimhood often rely on denial that members of the out-group may have valid claims to victimhood in order to interpret their experience and their members favourably. Accepting any blame for wrongdoing undermines groups’ alignment with the ideal victim image, and therefore denial of out-group victimhood serves to perpetuate an ‘image of blamelessness’ (Lawther, 2013: 166). This denial may take a number of forms, including a comprehensive denial of any evidence that members of the in-group may be responsible for violence against the out-group, or more insidiously, that members of the out-group may not be victims because the violence of the in-group was justified, or deserved.…”

Section: Group-serving Narratives Of Violence and Legitimacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Intergroup struggles over victimhood in violent conflict

Jankowitz

2017

International Review of Victimology

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Most groups in violent, intergroup conflict perceive themselves to be the primary or sole victims of that conflict. This often results in contention over who may claim victim status and complicates a central aim of post-conflict processes, which is to acknowledge and address harms experienced by the victims. Drawing from victimology scholarship and intergroup relations theory, this article proposes the victim-perpetrator paradigm as a framework to analyse how, why and to what end groups in conflict construct and maintain their claims to the moral status of victim. This interdisciplinary paradigm builds on the knowledge that groups utilise the 'ideal victim' construction to exemplify their own innocence and blamelessness in contrast to the wickedness of the perpetrator, setting the two categories as separate and mutually exclusive even where experiences of violence have been complex. Additionally, this construction provides for a core intergroup need to achieve positive social identity, which groups may enhance by demonstrating a maximum differentiation between the in-group as victims and those out-groups identified as perpetrators. The paradigm contributes greater knowledge on the social roots of victim contention in conflict, as well as how groups legitimise their violence against out-groups during and after conflict.

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Denial, Silence and the Politics of the Past: Unpicking the Opposition to Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland

Cited by 38 publications

References 11 publications

Finding a Voice: Silence and its Significance for Transitional Justice

Finding a Voice: Silence and its Significance for Transitional Justice

‘The Cast of the Past’: Truth Commissions and the Making and Marginalization of Identity

Intergroup struggles over victimhood in violent conflict

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