Acceso usuarios
Peter Shirlow
The Belfast Agreement ended the bulk of paramilitary and state violence, underlined majority consent, acknowledged the desire for Irish unification, reformed policing, de-militarised security and embedded ethno-sectarian power-sharing. However, the past remains unhealed and without an adequate vocabulary and behaviour required to structure conflict transformation. This article argues that the responsibility of politicians and other agents of victimhood should be to question the utility of harsh and one-sided assertions regarding the past and to conclude that denial is unpalatable when tied to amplified demand. The agency of that contestation is performance centred and rhetorically driven and reproduces alternative interpretations that evoke profound and divisive emotional states. The friction over truth recovery is abstraction-laden due to the agency of victimhood and its variant constructions.
