When conflict ends, violence gives way to memory contestation

Evidence

O’Dowd posits that the two perspectives are inadequate. He argues for a more discriminating analysis by identifying different forms of religion – such as a category of practice rather than a category of belief – and how these forms interact with different forms of nationalism in Belfast to generate violent conflict. In post-Good Friday Belfast, O’Dowd finds that while religion and nationalism had formerly interacted, inscribing violence on the spatial and physical fabric of the city for thirty years, that dynamic has now been replaced by contestation over sites of memory – how and what to remember about the thirty-year conflict known as “the Troubles” – and over the meta-narratives about the conflict’s outcomes. In this conflict, religion as practice served as the repository of collective memory, giving meaning to violence, sacrifice, and rituals and thus intersecting with the ethno-national parties. Thus, while he challenges the claims that religious differences are intrinsically violent, O’Dowd argues that “convergent and mutually supportive, religion and secular nationalism can sustain enduring violence and division.” — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s question about what happens when the enemy threat is removed — here the contested ‘sites of memory’ function as the arena where solidarity/division is re-instantiated.
• DEEPTHINKING: Religion as a category of practice rather than belief serving as repository of collective memory — this redefinition is dense and offers a mechanism (memory + sacrifice ritual) for how solidarity survives enemy-removal, central to the reader’s question.