Haunting and transitional justice: On lives, landscapes and unresolved pasts

Abstract

This article explores practices of haunting and ghosting after conflict-related loss. This is not to suggest a focus on the occult or the paranormal, but to use these phenomena as a prism through which to understand the intersection between unresolved pasts and the transmission of trauma post-conflict. As Michael Levan notes, trauma lingers ‘unexorcisably in the places of its perpetration, in the bodies of those affected, in the eyes of the witnesses, and in the politics of memory’. The ghost, according to Avery Gordon ‘is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us’. In this article I argue for three conceptualisations of haunting when past traumas remain unaddressed: the haunting of lost lives, the haunting of landscape, and the haunting presence of the unresolved past. The article focuses on Northern Ireland, a post-conflict jurisdiction described as being haunted by a ‘conflict calendar in which every day is an anniversary’ and extensive fieldwork with victims and survivors of the conflict. The article concludes by arguing that the presence of ghosts and the experience of haunting represent a ‘call to action’ in the quest to deal with a legacy of violent conflict and human rights abuses.

Naming and framing victims: Identity, ‘usable’ victimhood, and the spectral turn in transitional justice

“…However, as the ‘spectral turn’ in TJ literature has increasingly shown, such spectral figures invariably return to ‘haunt’ and ‘unsettle’ the post-conflict present, whether through keeping past injustices alive, demanding acknowledgement, or broadening our victimological worldview (Hite and Jara, 2020; Lawther, 2021; Willems, 2021). When confronted with these spectral figures, transitioning societies are forced to either ‘welcome’ or ‘reject’ them (Lorek-Jezinska and Wieckowska, 2017).…”

“…Perhaps the most illustrative example of this is how conceptions of victimhood remain inseparable from competing narratives of the past (Lawther, 2021). An exhaustive account of the various perspectives on political violence in the North of Ireland is beyond the ambit of this paper, but for the sake of brevity, the following summary should suffice (Hearty, 2017: 55): for Irish republicans within the minority Nationalist community in NI, the conflict represented a ‘national liberation struggle after years of institutional exclusion birthed by colonialism’; for the traditionally more powerful Unionist community, it grew out of a ‘terrorist’ plot by a minority within the minority community who always wanted to destroy ‘the NI statelet from within’; and for the British state, the conflict was a matter of ‘law and order’ whereby the British military played a supportive peacekeeping role to a ‘much maligned police force unable to hold back the violence of the “terrorist” on “both sides”’.…”

“…There are few sites where remembrance, commemoration, and the memory of conflict are as heavily ‘festishized’ (Smyth, 2017: 4), albeit that the post-conflict ‘memory boom’ remains deeply enrooted in competing narratives, identities, and understandings of victimhood (McDowell and Braniff, 2014). Its rich and contested memory activism evidences the intrinsic link between the construction of victimhood, the instrumentalization of identity, and post-conflict claims-making (Booth, 2009; Lawther, 2021). The ‘representation of victimhood’ in memory activism there is more about political and moral claims-making over the contested past than it is about individual suffering (Rosland, 2009), meaning that such commemorative claims-making necessitates what Olick (2007b: 19) calls a ‘usable past’: ‘a retrospective reconstruction [of the past] to serve the needs of the present’.…”

“…The re-emergence of problematic figures and/or events to complexify dominant narratives has led transitional justice (TJ) literature to take a recent 'spectral turn'. Granted, demands for justice, truth, and accountability that pervade TJ are, by their very nature, inherently attached to spectral figures that 'unsettle' the post-conflict present (Lawther, 2021), yet the 'spectral turn' is born of a more general scepticism with master narratives and a desire to critically examine representation, invisibility and silence (Lorek-Jezinska and Wieckowska, 2017). Studies on the blind spots in official discourses produced by truth commissions (Bevernage, 2012), the subaltern voices and experiences expressed through grassroots arts and theatre (Bell, 2014), and the hidden horrors lurking in the archives (Harris, 2021) all converge on the common theme of something or someone returning to 'haunt' dominant post-conflict narratives.…”

“…Studies on the blind spots in official discourses produced by truth commissions (Bevernage, 2012), the subaltern voices and experiences expressed through grassroots arts and theatre (Bell, 2014), and the hidden horrors lurking in the archives (Harris, 2021) all converge on the common theme of something or someone returning to 'haunt' dominant post-conflict narratives. Naturally, the 'spectral turn' has percolated into studies on TJ and memorialisation (Lawther, 2021;Willems, 2021), with a growing awareness of, and receptiveness to, the 'memory holes' (Brewer, 2020) that previously forgotten, silenced, or denied victims return to fill as 'spectres'. These 'spectres', the TJ literature notes, have a disruptive potential to unsettle claims-making in the present by resisting state power and official 'truth', demanding acknowledgement and accountability, and stretching the victimological boundaries of dominant narratives (Hite and Jara, 2020).…”