Troubled pasts, and their implicati… – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

How do you construct a typical future from a legacy of conflict? Resolve goes a extensive way, as the heritage of the EU shows – but setting up bridges is not uncomplicated. EU-funded researchers are analysing collective memories of past strife that however impacts group relations nowadays, in a bid to aid progress European integration.


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© sewcream #304603641, source:inventory.adobe.com 2020

The EU-funded REPAST project is discovering how societies deal with the extensive shadow of past conflicts, in a bid to create insights and deliver assistance for policymakers and civil modern society. Case scientific studies are remaining executed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Kosovo, Ireland, Poland and Spain.

‘We want to understand what features of many hard legacies dwell on in a problematic manner nowadays and develop hurdles to the integration and relations of the many populations in Europe,’ suggests project coordinator Dimitra Milioni of the Cyprus College of Technological know-how. ‘To do so, we are investigating how conflict discourses are remaining formulated and disseminated in the community sphere.’

As of March 2020, the project’s wide data-selection exercising has been concluded, and the researchers have begun to approach the comprehensive materials they have gathered. The leads to and attributes of individual conflicts could differ, but the researchers however be expecting to find commonalities in the managing of agonizing and most likely contested collective memories, Milioni describes.

Illuminating heritage

‘Our goal is to arrive at some kind of typology of troubled past discourses nowadays,’ she suggests. ‘We’re analysing how men and women in many cultures and nations came to bear in mind the resources of these conflicts and how they negotiate and with any luck , renegotiate the preliminary triggers. And we also want to see how all this is related to Europe nowadays, and European integration.’

Northern Ireland, for occasion, is one particular territory exactly where the past is hardly ever significantly away.

‘There’s a constant undercurrent of rigidity, primarily close to controversial issues,’ Milioni describes. ‘It is an instance of how even a settled troubled past can re-arise and could most likely also be revived, primarily through political discourse, occasionally through media discourse, but also through community discourse.’ In REPAST’s other scenario study nations around the world, the condition is related.

The project’s data selection deemed 4 areas of expression: politics, heritage – the two oral and official – and the media, as effectively as art and lifestyle. It provided activities as different as interviewing locals about their very own recollections of past activities or about the memories that had been handed on to them by elders, discovering regular and citizen media, scouring bash manifestos and viewing phase performances.

‘In Cyprus, for occasion, we located out that many artists are performing with political dance, which is not greatly identified,’ she suggests. ‘We noticed how this kind of creative exercise truly makes an attempt to recreate the past, and most likely also difficulties hegemonic representations of this past.’

Rapid forward

The emphasis in the project, which is thanks to end in April 2021, will now shift from data selection to data evaluation, and to the output of assets and suggestions for policymakers – the two in the REPAST scenario study nations around the world and at EU stage – and civil modern society organisations this sort of as non-governmental organisations invested in peacebuilding.

Other target audiences in areas with a bitter legacy contain tourist guides, for whom REPAST intends to organise seminars and make e-finding out materials. A data platform will permit any individual with an fascination to discover, review and contrast facts gathered by the project and entry its many other outputs, Milioni notes. The companions are also arranging to formulate methodology to aid future exploration in the field.

One tool beneath advancement is an on the net match that fosters players’ ability to evaluate historic facts. Several diversifications of the match, which is generally supposed for schoolchildren, will be developed to go well with distinct ages and nationwide contexts.

‘REPAST strives to express the idea that heritage as taught in faculties, for instance, or as introduced in community discourse, is normally built,’ Milioni emphasises. ‘As citizens, we have to have to just take a stage back again, we have to have to develop the capabilities to understand that what is remaining projected corresponds to a certain position of see, to a certain entry position.’