Justice, truth and oral history: legislating the past ‘from below’ in Northern Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on the ‘from below’ perspective which has emerged in transitional justice scholarship and practice over the past two decades, this article critically examines the dealing with the past debate in Northern Ireland. The paper begins by offering an outline of the from below perspective in the context of post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies which are struggling to come to terms with past violence and human rights abuses. Having provided some of the legal and political background to the most recent efforts to deal with the past in Northern Ireland, it then critically examines the relevant past-related provisions of the Stormont House Agreement, namely the institutions which are designed to facilitate ‘justice’, truth recovery and the establishment of an Oral History Archive. Drawing from the political science and social movement literature on lobbying and the ways in which interests groups may seek to influence policy, the paper then explores the efforts of the authors and others to contribute to the broader public debate, including through drafting and circulating a ‘Model Bill’ on dealing with the past (reproduced elsewhere in this issue) as a counterweight to the legislation which is required from the British government to implement the Stormont House Agreement. The authors argue that the combination of technical capacity, grass-roots credibility and ‘international-savvy’ local solutions offers a framework for praxis from below in other contexts where activists are struggling to extend ownership of transitional justice beyond political elites.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".