Collective Memories, Political Culture, and Policy: The Case of Irish Humanitarianism

• In Event: 226 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. How Political Culture Matters

Abstract

Despite the leading role global fields play in responses to mass violence, the examination of individual countries shows that national contexts also matter. It shows further that these contexts include not only structural but also cultural phenomena, specifically collective memories that shape political cultures and through them policy practice. A brief overview of global field conditions and consequences for the cultural processing of the mass atrocities committed in the Darfur region of Sudan is followed by an in-depth study of representations and policy practices in Ireland, a country that deviates from dominant global models. Based on quantitative media analysis, contrasting Ireland with seven other Western countries, and in depth interviews with policy makers and journalists, I seek to show that this deviation is at least partly due to Ireland’s collective memories of famine and extreme poverty, their interaction with a "humanitarian complex," and institutions and carrier groups (Mannheim 1952) that cultivate these memories.

Author

• Joachim J. Savelsberg, University of Minnesota