Description
How are antagonistic identifications produced in conflict and reproduced in peace? Drawing on over eighty interviews with community leaders, educators, and grassroots peacebuilders in Northern Ireland, this paper interrogates the persistence of antagonism after the cessation of violence. It advances a Lacanian–ontological security framework that accentuates the Hegelian dimension of psychoanalysis: the dialectical constitution of self and other through negation, recognition, and repression. I argue that conflict generates identity through a dialectical relationship with the enemy-other, wherein subjects gain coherence from the antagonism that structures their world. Peace processes, rather than dissolving this structure, often reproduce it through trauma-repressing practices. Such practices foreclose the symbolic working-through of loss and guilt, thereby preserving antagonism as the very condition of ontological security. By contrast, I propose trauma-sublimating practices that enable subjects to recognise the interlocking, multibranching character of conflict identities. These practices do not aim to erase antagonism but to sublimate it, transforming destructive drives into shared narratives of vulnerability and co-dependency. The analysis contributes to debates on post-conflict transformation by reframing trauma not as a residue of conflict but as a constitutive mechanism of identity formation. It invites a reconceptualisation of peace as a dialectical and affective process of sublimation rather than repression—one that requires confronting, rather than resolving, the violence that underwrites belonging.
