Elazar Barkan

Post-anti-colonial histories: representing the other in imperial Britain

New Aliens. By not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so. In bad times the barbarians were at our gates; on more fortunate occasions we were at theirs. As we changed, so did our alter ego. A hundred-plus years ago in England, “we” were the upper classes, perhaps the middling lot aspiring upward. Primarily men. The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home. And if we were not men, we mostly pretended we wished we were. We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us, an acquaintancy which led to multiculturalism, gender assertiveness, and subjectivism. In the process we found new aliens—the DWEM (dead white European males). Some of us have maintained our moral righteousness throughout, whereas others have been skeptical all along. Having gone through a generation of a strong antipatriarchal/anticolonial writing, writers of different persuasions have come to reevaluate and pose challenges to the new edifice. Suspended between conflicting incredulous postmodernist sensibilities and a pragmatic sense that communication is maintained despite its announced demise, it seems an opportune moment to examine the new attitudes to writing (imperial) history in light of such questions as the role of agency within and against a dominant discourse, the place of morality in the writing of history, and the process of alienation mediated among competing victimizations.

Memories of Violence: Micro and Macro History and the Challenges to Peacebuilding in Colombia and Northern Ireland

Abstract Historical memory of mass violence and war crimes plays a central role in a nation or an ethnic groups cultural identity, but is not given adequate attention in the politics of conflict resolution. The article argues that it is wrong and counterproductive to treat history as exclusively belonging to the past or as too complicated, and therefore to ignore it politically. Northern Ireland invested heavily in various transitional justice and conflict resolution mechanisms, but resolutely avoided efforts to bridge sectarian histories. This experience is juxtaposed to Colombia, where during the peace negotiations a historical commission was established to explore narrowing the sectarian disagreements through legitimizing their historical memories. What can the field of conflict resolution learn from the Colombian experience? Do historical commissions provide an additional tool for transitional justice and conflict resolution?

Historians and Conflict Resolution: The Challenge of Advocacy to Scholarship

In the last couple of years, Russia has on several occasions engaged in historical memory combat with some of its neighbours. In May 2009 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev established a special presidential wide ranging commission for ‘historic truth’ with the goal ‘to counteract against attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia’. This political statement, which some commentators saw as having ‘strategic importance’, was published on the eve of the military parade in Moscow to commemorate the Second World War Victory Day. This move to defend the motherland against ‘the falsifiers of history’ was directed at, among others, Ukraine and the Baltic states, but even more so against internal dissent (Felgenhauer 2009). The suppression of freedom of speech is one of the most pointed attacks on human rights in Russia and now Russia has officially opened ‘the history wars’ as a new frontier.