'Mobilising Memories: Protestant and Unionist Victims Groups and the Politics of Victimhood in the Irish Peace Process', in Paul Gready ed, Political Transition: Politics and Cultures, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2003, pp127 - 47
This essay was the first published outcome of my 'Cultural Memory and the Irish Troubles' project. It originated in a paper delivered at the 'Cultures of Political Transition: Memory, Identity and Voice' conference held at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in September 2000. This enabled me to frame my work in the terms of wider debates about the relationship between grassroots organisations of victims and survivors and state-sponsored mechanisms for dealing with the past, in contexts including the Southern Cone of Latin America, Guatemala, South Africa, and the former Yugoslavia. The essay formulated an argument about the role of the official Northern Ireland Victims Commission in structuring the terms of the Irish debate about the victims of violence, and the contesting of this framework by Unionist as well as nationalist victims groups, that was refined and extended in my monograph, 'Making Peace with the Past?' (Output 1).
Throughout the project, I have used workshops, seminars and conferences as a means to formulate and test my developing arguments and analyses, and to benefit from the critical feedback of colleagues working on cognate areas and relevant debates. In total I have presented some twenty-four such papers in diverse fora ranging from international conferences and colloquia in Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, the USA, and various European countries, to a workshop on 'Trauma and Memory in the Twentieth Century' to mark Holocaust Commemoration Day 2006 in Brighton, and events in London organised by the Cultural Memory Seminar and History Workshop. A number of these papers have given rise to publications (see Bibliography).
This essay has been cited in the journal Ethnos by Northern Irish cultural anthropologists working on similar themes to my own (Hastings Donnan and Kirk Simpson, ‘Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants’, vol 72 no 1 March 2007, pp5 - 28).
