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This chapter is drawn from the longer note (published as a book) by the authors which they submitted to the Haass talks in late 2013, entitled Dealing with the Past. As recorded here, the issue was a constant preoccupation of the chairman of the Policing Board and the one for which he secured their permission to address on his own behalf, which he did with the vice-chairman and Sir Hugh Orde. The chapter begins with examples of the scale of the challenge with reference to three atrocities – the Omagh, Claudy and Enniskillen bombings – before setting out the chairman’s paper Seeking to hold the Past in Healthy Balance with the Future, and going on to deal with the Consultative Group on the Past and the arrangements set up to reinvestigate unsolved murders from the Troubles including the role of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET). The chapter concludes with the remarks of Desmond Rea on a Talkback Panel at the West Belfast Festival in 2007, and the authors’ views as to how some of the legacy issues from the Troubles should best be dealt with.

Myanmar’s half-century of authoritarianism from 1962 to 2011 left a bitter legacy of gross human rights abuse and other historical injustice. One issue widely held by researchers to be a contributing factor to establishing a human rights culture and promoting democratization is dealing with the past. In this context, the chapter explores the demand for transitional justice in Myanmar, drawing on interviews with former political prisoners, surveys, survey experiments, and secondary sources. It reviews factors commonly associated with demand for transitional justice, examines the historical and political determinants of transitional justice in Myanmar, probes the authors’ surveys to investigate popular demand for transitional justice, uses interviews with former political prisoners to assess victims’ needs and their conception of justice, and connects a victim-centred approach with popular demand by examining support for transitional justice in light of experimental evidence simulating real-life resolution of historical injustice.

Since the end of the Angolan conflict in 2002, the ruling MPLA party has been promoting a ‘master narrative’ of ‘peace and reconstruction’ through which the Angolan conflict is resignified as a merely technical issue, and the question of ‘national reconciliation’ is limited to the reconstruction of infrastructures. This chapter analyses the discursive strategies and performative acts employed in these processes, and looks at the symbolic and material effects of this ‘technical’ hegemonic discourse in the country’s capital, Luanda. As national reconciliation is limited to the reconstruction of infrastructures, the master narrative of the ‘New Angola’ is also physically imposed on the urban cityscape; similarly, any substantive political dialogue about the war is precluded as a threat to the ‘gains of peace’, which are measured again in purely material terms of the built environment.

This concluding chapter argues that a careful reading of the memoirs of the Northern Ireland conflict may enable us to gain genuine insights into the lived experience and retrospective judgments of some of the key protagonists of the conflict. It may also allow an analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by these memoirists, as they seek to influence the ways in which the Troubles are remembered and interpreted by the wider society. Memoir-writing is but one dimension of the current ad hoc approach to ‘dealing with the past’ in Northern Ireland, but these memory entrepreneurs or ‘people’s remembrancers’ can sometimes appear locked into self-justifying and exclusive discourses. However, the potential for a creative and inclusive approach to the past should not be ruled out a priori.