Description
In the wake of armed conflict and civil war, unambiguous ‘peace’ rarely follows. Societies remain post-accord and peaceless: habitually intergroup antagonism persists and intergroup reconciliation is restricted, whilst post-accord political and criminal violence, poverty and exclusion perdure. Academic scholarship has debated the degree to which such customary characteristics of post-accord societies represent the legacy of, and are, therefore, directly connected to the historical weight exerted by, past episodes of political violence. Commonly, research has identified institutional weakness/democratic deficit, the availability of arms, male unemployment, the presence of powerful spoiling actors, entrenched collective beliefs and embedded norms shaping intergroup relations as core legacies of past violence, and as factors that impede peacebuilding and reconciliation. However, the conceptual parameters of the term legacy are rarely defined or discussed. Drawing on empirical data from the “Getting on with it” project (Colombia, Northern Ireland and Lebanon), this paper will unpack and problematise the notion of legacy, examining the links between legacy, nostalgia, echo, continuity, and rupture, with the aim of contributing to further clarification of the concept/term legacy and broader discussions around the idea of agency in post-accord societies. The paper argues that the spectrum of legacy/nostalgia/echo/continuity/rupture represents part of the knowledge system within post-accord societies that plays a crucial role in disjunctive conflict persistence or termination as part of the broader conflict-peace ecosystem.
