Historical Dialogue and Memory in Policing Change: the Case of the Police in Northern Ireland

This paper explores the complex relationship between organisational change and historical dialogue in transitional societies. Using the policing reform process in Northern Ireland as an example, the paper does three things: the first is to explore the ways in which policing changes were understood within the policing organisation and ‘community’ itself. The second is to make use of a processual approach, privileging the interactions of context, process and time within the analysis. Thirdly, it considers this perspective through the relatively new lens of ‘historical dialogue’: understood here as a conversation and an oscillation between the past, present and future through reflections on individual and collective memory. Through this analysis, we consider how members’ understandings of a difficult past (and their roles in it) facilitated and/or impeded the organisations change process. Drawing on a range of interviews with previous and current members of the organisation, this paper sheds new light on how institutions deal with and understand the past as they experience organisational change within the a wider societal transition from conflict to non-violence.

Truth at 24 frames a second? A working dialogue between a film-maker and a historical consultant about the making of The Enigma of Frank Ryan

We employ a practice-based methodology based on a ‘live’ film project to explore the different ways that film-makers and historians narrate the past. Through a case-study of the production and exhibition of a drama-documentary feature-film, The Enigma of Frank Ryan, on which both authors (film-maker Bell and historian McGarry) worked respectively as director and historical consultant, we explore a range of critical issues arising from our collaboration. Through a dialogue between a director and a historian, a model of good practice between historians and film-makers emerges.

State History, Historical Legitimacy and Modern Ethnic Diversity

How much does the antiquity of states, and the sometimes arbitrary nature of colonial boundaries, explain the modern degree of ethnic diversity? It is shown that states with greater historical legitimacy (more continuity between the pre-colonial and post-colonial state) have less ethnic diversity. Historical legitimacy is more strongly correlated with ethnic diversity than are the antiquity of states, genetic diversity or the duration of human settlement. Although historical legitimacy is particularly pertinent to Africa, the correlation also holds outside Africa.

Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism

A timely, and uniquely historical, look at how war turns soldiers, and all of us, into tourists. Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between two seemingly opposed worlds—warfare and tourism. Debbie Lisle shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behavior of soldiers in warespecially the experiences of Western military forces in “exotic” settings. This includes not only R&R but also how battlefields themselves become landscapes of leisure and tourism. It further explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in the postwar context, from “Dark Tourism” (engaging with displays of conflict and atrocity) to exhibitions of conflict in museums and at memorial sites, as well as in advertising, film, journals, guidebooks, blogs, and photography. Focused on how war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination, Holidays in the Danger Zone critically examines the long historical arc of the war-tourism nexus from nineteenth-century imperialism to World War I and World War II, from the Cold War to globalization and the War on Terror.