When is a justice campaign over? Transitional justice, ‘overing’ and Bloody Sunday
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0010836721989365 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836721989365
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(4) 394 –413
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836721989365
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When is a justice campaign
over? Transitional justice,
‘overing’ and Bloody Sunday
Tom Bentley
Abstract
This article explores the political, strategic and emotional issue of victim groups deciding to
continue or discontinue central components of a justice campaign in the aftermath of receiving
‘truth’. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the article focuses on relatives and other stakeholders’
varying positions on (dis)continuing the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march after the
publication of the Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the UK Prime Minister’s apology for
the massacre. I demonstrate that there has emerged an, at times, acrimonious schism between
those who feel the apology and report were sufficient to stop the march and those who believe
them to be insufficient. Thus, while much of the literature on political apology evaluates its
effects on the dyadic relationship between victim and perpetrator, this article develops Sara
Ahmed’s concept of ‘overing’ to demonstrate that the ostensible moment of truth can create
unanticipated and deleterious intra-victim tensions. The article concludes by suggesting practical
measures emerging from the findings that other justice campaigns may consider.
Keywords
Bloody Sunday, justice campaign, ‘overing’, political apology, ‘truth’
If you’ve been involved in a campaign, it’s often hard to say, ‘It’s over, it’s done and dusted,
we’ve gone as far as we can, I want to involve myself in other things.’ But I think what’s
interesting about the Bloody Sunday families is you see both. There are some people, some
relatives, close relatives, who are basically saying, ‘Look, I no longer want to be drawn in every
time. As far as I’m concerned, Bloody Sunday is over, we did the best we can, we got a good
result, and I want to live my life.’
Robin Percival – Inaugural Chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust (interview).
It is not the time to be over it, if it is not over.
Sara Ahmed (2012: 181).
Corresponding author:
Tom Bentley, Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Science, University of
Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, UK.
Email: t.bentley@abdn.ac.uk
989365CAC0010.1177/0010836721989365Cooperation and ConflictBentley
research-article2021
Article
Bentley 395
Introduction
On 15 June 2010, immediately following the publication of the Report of the Bloody
Sunday Inquiry, UK Prime Minister David Cameron apologised for the British army’s
1972 massacre of civilians at a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. For Rotberg
(2006: 33), like many academics working on the politics of remorse, ‘apology can use-
fully create the possibility of closure in post-conflict transitions’. Such a claim elicits
difficult questions: what does closure mean? Is it desirable? What are the entailing power
relations? On the more critical side of the spectrum, there are scholars who contend that
state apology tends to be imbued with hegemonic power relations (Bentley, 2016;
Corntassel and Holder, 2008; Gibney, 2002; Somani, 2011). Indeed, from one perspec-
tive, political apology can be considered a form of reactionary discourse termed by Sara
Ahmed (2012) as ‘overing’. This is to say that apology can declare an issue resolved,
thereby delegitimising and reducing space for those who point to how the injustice
endures. In this vein, Cameron’s (2010) apology, like others of the genre, stated the wish
to ‘move on’ and ‘close this painful chapter’.
Intriguingly, in the case of Bloody Sunday, it was not only the apologiser who engaged
in the discourse of closure; certain relatives and others who had campaigned so tirelessly
for justice publicly declared that day that ‘we have overcome’.1 Rather than focusing on
the overing techniques of the government, this article explores how the injunction to over
Bloody Sunday has been variously incorporated, reconfigured and resisted by those who
campaigned for justice. In particular, the article focuses on the site of the Bloody Sunday
commemoration march, an annual event in which relatives and campaigners retrace the
steps taken that day. Controversy has surrounded the event since, following the Report of
the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (henceforth ‘the Report’) and Cameron’s apology, most rela-
tives decided that 2011 would be the final march. Since then, however, some family
members, survivors and civil society groups have continued marching, and there has
emerged an, at times, acrimonious schism between those who have stopped and those
who continue marching. The empirical puzzle thereby informing the article is: why do
some relatives and stakeholders wish to continue the annual march and others wish for it
to stop? Addressing this question, I explore the debates surrounding the march’s (dis)
continuation and how this speaks to the politics of overing.
Having undertaken extensive semi-structured interviews with relatives of those killed
and members of the justice campaign, I demonstrate that participants’ decisions to con-
tinue or stop marching pivot on their evaluation of the ‘truth’ received; those largely
favourable of the Report and apology are inclined to cease marching, while those with an
unfavourable opinion continue. Moreover, I trace how the issue of the march’s (dis)con-
tinuation has caused disharmony among relatives and campaigners. Thus, where most
literature on political apology focuses on the dyadic relationship between perpetrator and
victim groups, this article argues that the ostensible moment of truth can create unantici-
pated and deleterious intra-victim tensions. The article thereby contributes an added
dimension to the concept of overing for which Ahmed had not accounted: the potential
for the government’s overing manoeuvre to create animosity within the victim commu-
nity between those that wish to continue justice campaigns and those who wish to dis-
continue aspects of it. Such schisms are detrimental to victim solidarity and efforts at
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