Framing Blame and Victimhood in Post-conflict Northern Ireland

‘Victims of’ human rights abuses in transitional justice: hierarchies, perpetrators and the struggle for peace

“…124 While other victims might question their claim to victimhood, 125 in being born into marginalised communities that were embroiled in political violence this category inflicted and experienced harms in a structural context they found themselves in rather than in one they themselves had engineered. 126 This is not, however, to strip such actors of their agency. For sure, they may not have determined the circumstances they were born into but they did determine how they responded to these circumstances.…”

“…150 While these problems arise in most DDR processes, 151 in the North of Ireland there is the added complication of a politicised zero-sum analysis falsely depicting any attempt to tackle structural barriers to the reintegration of former combatants as working to the material detriment of their victims. 152 With successful reintegration comprising genuine economic, political and social reintegration of former combatants, 153 even a cursory glance of Northern Ireland's approach exposes shortcomings; economically former combatants have been consigned to low paid employment due to the barriers and exclusion presented by 'residual criminalisation', politically they have been subjected to repeated attempts to delegitimise them as bona fide post-conflict political actors, and socially they continue to be framed as the binary opposite of their victims which reduces them to being an outlet for the retributive desires of such victims that were carried over from the conflict into the imperfect process of transition. 154 These victims of circumstances, then, become victims of the peace through discursive 'othering', continued material deprivation and what amounts to little more than scapegoating dressed up as victim centric transitional justice.…”

Victims Who Have Done Nothing or Victims Who Have Done Nothing Wrong: Contesting Blame and ‘Innocent Victim’ Status in Transitioning Societies

“…However, determining the worth or innocence of victims of political violence in this way is problematic because it elides the inherent ideological nature of the law in such contexts (Elias 1986;McGarry & Walklate 2015), it presupposes that all parties to the conflict accepted and operated to a universal legal regime, and it erroneously posits that criminal law is capable of capturing the full complexity of innocence and blame during conflict. What transpires is a reductive concept of blame that can be conveniently cast onto a few 'officially guilty' culprits (Jamieson 2016).…”