Spectres of Peace: Civic Participation in Northern Ireland
Spectres of Peace: Civic Participation in Northern Ireland
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和平的幽灵：北爱尔兰的公民参与
DOI：
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发表时间：
2004
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
V. Bell
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
V. Bell
将北爱尔兰公民论坛理解为《贝尔法斯特协定》和《1998年北爱尔兰法》试图使之成为可能的新治理模式的一部分，可以将该论坛分析为一种和平技术，这反过来又促使一个新的民主主题的形成。此外，这一‘主体’不仅在新的制度空间和新的过程中运作，而且在新的伦理格局中运作。因此，虽然参与性精神将论坛的工作与“民主”概念的更广泛变化联系在一起，但论坛的具体情况--它作为北爱尔兰冲突历史背景下的和平进程的一部分--赋予其工作具有复杂的时间层面的另一个特殊目的。新的图景突出了“和平的呼唤”，开启了一种复杂的关系，涉及过去、现在和未来可能发生的事情。这里认为，和平需要一种面向未来的行动号召，一种新精神的号召。但这种新的精神不能像一种简单的多愁善感那样简单地召唤、推销和传播，尤其是因为多愁善感只是忽视了现在与过去的联系。相反，对和平的追求必须在现在的混乱中寻求，因此必须对“过去”的异质性持开放态度。相互竞争的禁令源于过去的精神，敦促现在的人走不同的道路。根据德里达的《马克思的幽灵》(1994)，有人认为这些鬼魂不能简单地被驱逐。正如对公民论坛的这项研究所表明的那样，论坛如何在体制和程序上定位自己，必然涉及对过去和未来概念的谈判。和平的成功追求将取决于现在的人们如何接受过去的幽灵，以及他们如何能够允许他们的命令作为未来可能性的一个条件。
Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This ‘subject’, moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the participatory ethos links the Forum’s work to much wider changes in the notion of ‘democracy’, the specificities of the Forum’s context - its role as part of the Peace process set against Northern Ireland’s history of conflict - give its work a further particular purpose with a complex temporal dimension. The new landscape is one in which the ‘call to Peace’ is foregrounded, initiating a complex relationship to what has been, what ‘is’ and what the future potentially holds. Peace, it is argued here, requires a performative call to the future, a call for a new spirit. But this new spirit is one that cannot be simply conjured, marketed and distributed like an easy sentimentality, not least because sentimentality simply ignores the present’s tie to the past. Rather, the pursuit of Peace has to be sought in the messiness of the present, and has therefore to be open to the heterogeneity of ‘the past’. Competing injunctions arise from the spirits of the past, urging those in the present to follow divergent paths. Following Derrida’s Spectres of Marx(1994), it is argued that these ghosts cannot be simply banished. As this study of the Civic Forum illustrates, how the Forum positions itself, both institutionally and procedurally, necessarily involves the negotiation of notions of past and future. The successful pursuit of Peace will be dependent upon how those in the present receive the ghosts of the past and how they can allow for their enjoining as a condition of that future’s very possibility.