4.19. Memory, Rights, and Democratic Futures

The Northern Ireland peace agreement of 1998 formally ended 30 years of violence. However, rather than finally resolving political conflict around the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, the 1998 accord was a political unsettlement where the heart of disagreement was translated into institutions for continuing contestation and negotiation (Cf Pospisil 2020). As a result, Northern Ireland remains in transition and the “peace process”, has now lasted for almost 30 years -as long as the violent conflict itself. While the formalised role of memory in peacebuilding is well-established, this paper will engage with memories of peacebuilding, showing how Northern Ireland’s ongoing transition shapes and is shaped by processes of memory crystallising around peacebuilding as much as of conflict. Drawing on fieldwork across the 20th and 25th anniversary commemorations of the peace agreement, I analyse how the meaning of peace is profoundly redefined and redistributed by these events. Studying consecutive commemorations of the peace agreement allows us to see the shifting frames for understanding what was accomplished and what is possible and desirable in the evolving context of political unsettlement. In the commemorations, a selection of actors are invited to draw particular boundaries around the issues at stake and place a variety of actions and values at the core of conflict and peacebuilding. They get to highlight particular aspects of the agreement and its shortcomings and they take away distinctive lessons from the process and its outcomes. In extension of this analysis, the paper calls for a focus on remembering peace and peace processes as much as conflict in memory studies.

Freedom of expression has long stood as a cornerstone of liberal democracy and a fundamental human right. It originated as resistance to monarchical and ecclesiastical control over discourse, particularly through censorship of the press—the dominant medium of its time. The fusion of press freedom with expressive freedom reflected an era when the media were scarce, unidirectional, stationary and mostly print. The communicative environment of the twenty-first century, however, offers abundant, interactive and mobile media offering multi-mediated formats of expression. It enables expression, participation, reception, storage, and reinterpretation by individuals, groups and organizations. Continuing to frame communication rights solely around expression no longer reflects the realities of contemporary media nor do they fully contain the complexities of human communication. A normative framework adequate to this environment must expand from a right to express to a broader right to communicate, encompassing the capacities to receive, to be informed, to belong, and crucially, to remember. This paper advances the proposition that memory should be recognized as a communication right. Communication is not a momentary act but a process that depends on continuity. The capacity to remember—socially, institutionally, and technologically—renders discourse intelligible and democratic life sustainable. Without it, communication fragments into isolated utterances devoid of shared meaning and accountability. Recognizing a right to memory as a constitutive element of the broader right to communicate reframes memory as an active, protected dimension of democratic participation. It highlights both its material infrastructures—archives, platforms, and data—and its social practices of remembering, forgetting, being remembered and being forgotten. The paper offers a normative framework for understanding memory as a communicative capability essential to sustaining democracy over time.

The paper draws mainly on primary sources to explore how memory and democracy intersect in Argentina, through Ricoeur’s theoretical lens. Primary sources include Ricoeur’s core texts—Memory, History, Forgetting; Oneself as Another; and The Course of Recognition—as well as documentary materials such as laws, decrees, rulings, and official reports. Methodologically, the analysis is hermeneutic, attending to narrative structures, omissions, reiterations, and gaps; it distinguishes dominant narratives from counter narratives, focusing especially on how terms like “victim,” “justice,” and “forgiveness” are deployed. The research also employs a diachronic comparative approach—tracing Argentina’s memory practices from 1984 to see how Ricoeurian concepts (forgetting, narrative identity, justice) emerge, evolve, and are contested over time. Key findings show that Ricoeur’s theoretical tools clarify both what Argentina's democracy has achieved and where memory work remains fragile. On the achievement side, institutional practices—trials for crimes against humanity, truth commissions, memorial sites, and legal frameworks—have contributed to building a strong shared democratic identity. However, more recently, key memory institutions have been defunded or dismantled; archives are under threat; there is a rise in relativist and denialist discourses, so that these shifts indicate erosion or contestation. Moving forward, sustaining democratic identity and historical memory in Argentina will require protecting memory institutions, ensuring legal and archival transparency, resisting denialism, and giving space to alternative and marginalized narratives.