Chapter 2 discusses the use and contestation of the category expatriate in the archive of Kenyan independence. Specifically, it looks at the transformation of the colonial civil service into a national Kenyan civil service and the associated transformation of colonial civil servants into either ‘local’ or ‘expatriate’ officers. The chapter traces how the term expatriate was used to reproduce white privilege and British influence in the post-colonial period. As such, the expatriate was key to British international development aid, understood to be a tool for retaining global influence in a bipolar world, and indirectly helped entrench inequality in the Kenyan civil service and Kenyan society. Yet, if the category expatriate was used to translate colonial into postcolonial racism, it did so without relying explicitly on ‘race’, as racism was increasingly enunciated through a lexicon of culture and through economistic ‘logic’ and ‘common sense’.

This chapter is concerned with aspects of collective memory-making in societies emerging from violent conflict. It considers the ways in which the personal methodologies of creating public acts of memory intersect across different contested spaces and societies emerging from conflict, and, where appropriate, draws comparative points for reflection. In his formative study, Maurice Halbwachs (1992) proposed that memory is socially constructed around the concept of space and that spatial memory allows us to explore the past in the present. As he shows, public and collective memory after violent conflict has attracted a rich and productive field for interdisciplinary research. The chapter centres upon what Pierre Nora (1996) has described as the lieu de mémoire (the site of memory) and, specifically, upon the ways in which visual collective memory is utilised at sites and public places impacted by war. In such places, not unlike Northern Ireland, the past is interconnected with contemporary socio-political dynamics. For instance, the failure to engage with the heritage and history of and at the site of Maze Long Kesh prison is a notable point of contrast; here, the decommissioned space communicates its own messages. This chapter shows that in other contested societies, memory practice impacts how events from the past are understood in the present. This urges questions of agency and power: how is the past engaged with, understood and represented through visual forms?

This chapter explores the ways in which social inequalities are not so much erased by sugar talk as mobilised strategically and one-dimensionally to signify ignorance, indolence, a lack of self-discipline and excessive vulnerability to the allure of sugar. Focusing on discourses of race, gender and class, it argues that these inequalities are selectively (in)visible in the data. They are simultaneously absent and present, with the everyday lived experiences of the most disadvantaged sublimated to their discursive roles as the abject Other against which elite, white neoliberal citizenship can be measured. The chapter concludes that leaving the articulation of the problem of sugar to those best positioned to accrue status by giving it up solidifies rather than challenges those inequalities.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the Northern Ireland conflict through the broader conceptual lens of ethno-nationalism. In common with the work of Anthony D. Smith, it acknowledges that ethnic forms of nationalism are ‘of varying kinds and degrees, some of them relatively peaceful like the Catalan and Czech movements, others aggressive and exclusive of the kind witnessed in pre-war Germany and Italy or present-day former Yugoslavia’. Both Ulster loyalists and Irish republicans in Northern Ireland represent the more ‘aggressive and exclusive’ fringes of rival ethno-national communities. Not only have they consistently opted to obfuscate or forget the excesses of their violent pasts, but have also actively misremembered these acts in a way that seeks to legitimise present political decisions and positions, through collective rituals backed up by a strong sense of community identity and a political cause. What is intriguing is not necessarily why people in divided societies engage in collective rituals, traditions and culture per se, but how they have sought to employ them in the service of legitimising their claims of ethnic entitlement in ways that are competitive. Historical memories of a troubled past are conjured and marshalled in support of the continuation of a centuries-old struggle in a way that threatens to de-stabilise transition processes. Northern Ireland is no exception. In closing, the chapter advances a normative perspective that sees professional historians as playing an important role in promoting a more objective understanding of the past in a way that can aid the cause of reconciliation.

Chapter 1 situates this study of the category expatriate within migration research on expatriates and privileged migration, before outlining recent scholarship on the coloniality of migration and mobility, and introducing interdisciplinary perspectives on social categories. The chapter thus introduces debates that this book centrally speaks to, and which have helped in thinking about the ‘categorical’ ordering of movement and belonging as a site where power is negotiated. The chapter then outlines the research strategy of following the expatriate and introduces the three sites visited for this research.

The book closes with a chapter on the end of life in France. It shows first that, despite a certain number of tensions, the French public health system remains strong and able to provide a relatively high level of healthcare to the elderly in particular. Neo-liberally inspired reforms have sapped some of its care capacity, but overall there has been no deep change since the 1980s. Similarly, the French pension system has proved to be particularly resilient. A new attempt at reform is currently in process and has generated politicized protests. But it remains to be seen what these protests will result in. Moreover, as regards the end of life in France, inheritance laws are just as structuring as pensions, if not more. As Thomas Piketty has shown, these laws build in inequalities between those who hold property and those who do not. Here a part of this chapter extends this analysis into an examination of what is passed on, in what form and how this can affect family structures (thus feeding back to phenomena discussed in Chapter 1). In addition, the symbolic dimension of passing on is addressed around the funeral arrangements of the French, which have changed considerably since the 1980s. Overall, however, the central message of this chapter is that, for the moment at least, this tranche of life in France continues to be structured by rules, norms and policies that gained their initial strength during the years 1945–80.

This chapter explores processes of collective memorialisation in relation to the violence in Northern Ireland of August 1969. In so doing, it explores the speeches and statements of republican politicians as well as drawing on historical theory to provide suggestions why these events were remembered. The central argument of the chapter is that the commemoration of ‘1969 as pogrom’ is driven by what Eelco Runia (2006) has defined as ‘parallel processing’, which sees a collective ‘remembering or subconscious re-enactment of past events in a new context a “compulsion to repeat”’. In this case, the collective memory of the events of the 1920s ‘stowed away’ into the then present and provided a particular prism through which the events of 1969 came to be remembered. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this phenomenon for initiatives that attempt to deal with the legacies of past violence in Northern Ireland. But the lessons might equally apply in other international settings where the memory of ethnic violence is central to contemporary politics, such as the Balkans, which is discussed in the above-mentioned work of Runia.

In 2011, a monument in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, was unveiled by the city’s mayor, Melis Myrzakmatov, on the first anniversary of violence there between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities. However, the monument does not record what those events were and there is no explicit mention of the conflict in the inscription, which is written in Kyrgyz, Russian and English, but not Uzbek. This monument and the way it implicitly presents the events it does (not) commemorate is a testament to the multiple ways in which public space can be used to capture and construct memories by those who present official memories and those who view the resulting artefacts. This chapter explores how comparisons of conflict over past events in Northern Ireland with other cases can generate new perspectives. However, such exploration requires critical engagement with the difficulties of drawing meaningful comparison. The key argument is that while Northern Ireland is undoubtedly entangled in arguments about the legacy of the past and its meaning for the future, the level of ‘noise’ in the debate reminds us that others elsewhere are very limited in their ability to contest the use of different platforms to shape the past into a certain story. The examination of the way in which memories of the Osh conflict have been formed will involve focus on the physical monuments to it, principally the peace memorial mentioned above as well as a statue known as The Tears of the Mothers.

This chapter draws on the example of a collaborative project between the author and National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI) on the question of Northern Ireland’s 1968 to propose a potentially fruitful approach to confronting the legacy issue head-on. Starting with an overview of the difficulties of managing the past in Northern Ireland, the chapter then moves to set out the context of the theoretical field of memory studies with a specific focus on defining the notion of agonistic memory. There then follows a discussion of how the antagonistic–cosmopolitan–agonistic paradigm can be applied to the context of the province as it has moved from violence to peace. The example of the civil rights struggle of 1968–69 and the memory politics surrounding this pivotal moment is then used to demonstrate the difficulties and a potential way through them. It will be argued that the expansion and effectiveness of the NMNI collaboration provides potentially applicable lessons beyond the case of Northern Ireland’s 1968.

The issue of how to deal with the past has been on agenda from the time of the negotiations which led to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. This chapter outlines and discusses issues around legacy and in particular official and government proposals surrounding the issue and the subsequent criticisms that have been levelled at those proposals made for dealing with the past in Northern Ireland. The chapter discusses the impact and reaction to various reports, from that of former senior civil servant Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, to those proposals made in the Stormont House Agreement (SHA). It is argued that the proposals as set out in the SHA give the politicians too much influence over the process and too few incentives to risk getting burnt by it. The chapter discusses whether it is likely, or even possible, to deal with the issues of legacy along the lines proposed. This chapter argues that ways need to be found to separate dealing with the past from the political present. The lack of progress around legacy issues highlight problems in Northern Ireland over political will, a perceived need to defend past actions and an unwillingness to allow narratives to be undermined.

Three notable points of concern arise when thinking about the need to re-examine the past (more specifically, the period referred to as the Troubles) in Northern Ireland. The first relates to the problem of selectivity in how the past is conceived and constructed. The second relates to the problem of detaching expectations about how the past will be approached from community and group narratives that stress that past in conflictive and divisive terms. And the third relates to the problem of how the outcomes of any legacy process (a formal system of measures to assist engagement) can help build a future that breaks from the enmity of the past. There is little doubt that a comprehensive process that effectively grapples with legacy issues has to be constructed at government level if it is to have any chance of succeeding. Yet, at the same time, envisaging a legacy process ostensibly in political terms is almost certain to make it fail. This chapter argues that by developing a legacy process as an extension of political interests it is obvious that such a process becomes a reflection of communal rather than individual priorities, and that zero-sum, competitive scenarios will dominate proceedings, as well as outcomes. In this instance, a legacy process will do little more than provide a platform to further reinforce old conflict attitudes and ideologies, with individual needs minimised as communal or group needs are maximised.

This chapter analyses the complex connections between varieties of contemporary Irish republicanism and the notion of ‘radical nostalgia’, a term adopted from Peter Glazer’s (2005) important work on commemoration of the Spanish Civil War. The first section is devoted to examining the relationship between nostalgia and radical (or revolutionary) politics, and some of the characteristic ways in which socialist and/or radical nationalist movements have utilised nostalgia as a means to mobilise support. In the (alleged) context of the ‘unfinished revolution’ in Ireland, various strands of the republican ‘family’, including both the ‘mainstream’ or ‘establishment republicanism’ of Provisional Sinn Féin as well as many of the myriad so-called ‘dissident’ groups, have sought to lay claim to the legacies and heritage of the Irish ‘struggle’ and ‘resistance’ to British rule in Ireland. In particular, there has been an intra-republican effort to mobilise radical nostalgia in the service of divergent contemporary political goals, leading to a mnemonic competition regarding which branch of the movement can most plausibly claim the mantle of authenticity and continuity with the ‘heroic’ history (both recent and more distant) of Irish republican activism. The chapter further analyses the broad contours of these struggles over ‘ownership’ of republican memory, with specific reference to the experiences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Finally, the chapter focuses upon the ‘post-conflict’ generation of republicans, which, it is argued, has often been recruited into ‘dissident’ organisations, at least in part on the basis of a radical nostalgia, or exo-nostalgia, for a past they never knew.

This chapter considers the construction of loyalist narratives and the use of memory within the political mobilisation of that section of society. In particular, it will consider how collective memories are shared and displayed by those identifying as loyalists, and particularly among loyalist paramilitary groupings and their immediate constituency. Further, it will explore the place of memory in the development of a conflict culture, and the understandings of those who still set their beliefs within the framework of conflict. It places these views within the collective memories utilised within their communities of origin to present a particular worldview and suggests those who affiliate with paramilitary organisations drew upon a specific view of the past for their motivation. The Troubles in Northern Ireland produced huge social turmoil and political division that still structures and provides guidelines for that society. Much of its legacy is encapsulated in, and presented through, expressions and representations of collective memory. The memories projected through various acts of commemoration retain a political intensity and relevance to everyday life, that it is almost impossible to overstate, and the consequences for contemporary social and political relationships and formations remain with us. Such deposits of memory rest on a series of exclusive community myths and understandings; memories which add to long-standing adversarial readings and understandings of the past; and those narratives which different groupings draw on to reinforce their sense of self-identity and Self.