Haunting and Transitional Justice: On Lives, Landscapes and Unresolved Pasts in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Building on approaches to ghosts and haunting by Avery Gordon and Jacques Derrida, this chapter is concerned with 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 principle form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us’. In this chapter I argue for three conceptualisations of haunting when past traumas remain unaddressed – the haunting of lost lives; the haunting of landscape; and the haunting effect of the unresolved past. This conceptualisation demands that we, for example, see haunting as an animated state in which repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known and see place-memory as capable of embodying ghosts and haunting reminders of the past. The chapter focuses on Northern Ireland, a post-conflict jurisdiction described as being haunted by a ‘conflict calendar in which every day is an anniversary’. There, the dead remain a potent and emotive means of legitimising and perpetuating the ethnonational and sectarian characteristics of political debate. The chapter is structured around over 100 semi-structured interviews with victims and survivors of the Northern Ireland conflict. While focusing on the case study of Northern Ireland, the chapter is relevant to other transitional and post-conflict societies more broadly.

Keywords: haunting, trauma, post-conflict, dealing with the past, Northern Ireland.