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

The EU-funded REPAST project is exploring how societies offer with the prolonged shadow of previous conflicts, in a bid to deliver insights and give guidance for policymakers and civil culture. Situation studies are staying done in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Kosovo, Eire, Poland and Spain.

‘We want to fully grasp what features of numerous difficult legacies are living on in a problematic vogue currently and make hurdles to the integration and relations of the numerous populations in Europe,’ suggests project coordinator Dimitra Milioni of the Cyprus University of Engineering. ‘To do so, we are investigating how conflict discourses are staying formulated and disseminated in the general public sphere.’

As of March 2020, the project’s vast details-selection exercise has been completed, and the scientists have started to system the comprehensive content they have gathered. The results in and characteristics of specific conflicts could vary, but the scientists still be expecting to find commonalities in the managing of agonizing and perhaps contested collective recollections, Milioni describes.

Illuminating record

‘Our target is to arrive at some variety of typology of troubled previous discourses currently,’ she suggests. ‘We’re analysing how individuals in numerous cultures and nations arrived to try to remember the resources of these conflicts and how they negotiate and hopefully renegotiate the initial triggers. And we also want to see how all this is connected to Europe currently, and European integration.’

Northern Eire, for occasion, is one particular territory where by the previous is never ever significantly away.

‘There’s a consistent undercurrent of stress, primarily all around controversial difficulties,’ Milioni describes. ‘It is an illustration of how even a settled troubled previous can re-emerge and could perhaps also be revived, primarily as a result of political discourse, sometimes as a result of media discourse, but also as a result of general public discourse.’ In REPAST’s other situation study nations around the world, the situation is identical.

The project’s details selection thought of 4 areas of expression: politics, record – both of those oral and formal – and the media, as well as artwork and tradition. It involved things to do as diverse as interviewing locals about their own recollections of previous events or about the recollections that were handed on to them by elders, exploring conventional and citizen media, scouring bash manifestos and viewing phase performances.

‘In Cyprus, for occasion, we located out that numerous artists are working with political dance, which is not greatly recognized,’ she suggests. ‘We observed how this variety of artistic action basically attempts to recreate the previous, and perhaps also issues hegemonic representations of this previous.’

Quick forward

The emphasis in the project, which is because of to conclude in April 2021, will now shift from details selection to details assessment, and to the output of means and recommendations for policymakers – both of those in the REPAST situation study nations around the world and at EU amount – and civil culture organisations these as non-governmental organisations invested in peacebuilding.

Other target audiences in areas with a bitter legacy involve vacationer guides, for whom REPAST intends to organise seminars and create e-studying supplies. A details platform will enable any individual with an desire to discover, review and contrast info collected by the project and access its numerous other outputs, Milioni notes. The partners are also setting up to formulate methodology to aid foreseeable future exploration in the industry.

One particular software beneath improvement is an on line sport that fosters players’ ability to assess historical info. Several variations of the sport, which is generally meant for schoolchildren, will be developed to go well with different ages and national contexts.

‘REPAST strives to express the concept that record as taught in educational facilities, for illustration, or as offered in general public discourse, is normally produced,’ Milioni emphasises. ‘As citizens, we need to consider a move back, we need to produce the competencies to fully grasp that what is staying projected corresponds to a particular position of see, to a particular entry position.’