Afterlives of the Troubles

Life stories, culture and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland

Graham Dawson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781526146496
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526146489
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Focusing on experiential life stories across a range of forms and practices, this book investigates subjectivity, culture and the cultural politics of representation as a neglected dimension of conflict transformation in the Northern Irish peace process. Interdisciplinary critical perspectives from historical cultural studies, oral history and popular-memory theory inform close interpretive engagement with life stories in their cultural, historical and geographical contexts. This enables exploration of the complex temporal dynamics of 'post-conflict' subjectivities in the lengthening 'afterlife' of the Troubles, where feelings attached to conflict experiences are not 'past' but haunt the present, and memory-work carries future-oriented desires for truth, justice and reconciliation. Through case studies responding to the evolving peace process through this prism of life-storytelling, Afterlives maps a contested history of legacy policy-making and approaches to 'dealing with the past', from devolution in 2005-7 through to the Legacy and Reconciliation Act of 2023.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Note on research ethics
• Note on conventions used for transcribed interviews
• Introduction – Afterlives of the Troubles: life stories, ‘post-conflict’ culture and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland
• 1 Where am I? Unsettling encounters in researching memory, subjectivity and conflict transformation after the Northern Irish Troubles
• 2 The meaning of ‘moving on’: from trauma to the history and culture of feelings and emotions
• 3 Masculinities and the affective afterlife of ‘the terrorist’ in conflict transformation: representation, identity and intersubjectivity
• 4 The desire for justice: discourses of victimhood, psychic reparation and the politics of memory
• 5 Memoryscapes, spatial legacies of conflict and the culture of historical reconciliation in ‘post-conflict’ Belfast
• 6 Memory, the afterlife of emotion and the temporal politics of ‘post-conflict’ transition
• 7 Storytelling in ‘post-conflict’ times: experiential narrative, subjectivity and the temporal practice of community-based conflict transformation
• 8 Memories of conflict and redevelopment at West Belfast interfaces: complex temporalities and place-based structures of feeling in oral histories from the Dúchas Archive
• 9 Oral history and the legacy of conflict: policy, history-making and the afterlife of feeling in archived interviews of the Troubles
• Index