Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how those who worked for the state in a military capacity remember serving in Belfast in the context of the material transformation of the urban landscape that post-conflict 'normalisation' brought to the city.

Paper long abstract:

The recent period of conflict in Northern Ireland officially ended with the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the partial withdrawal of British troops (2007). During the conflict, the British Army's presence in Belfast involved the construction of a 'military theatre' including the erection of watchtowers, barracks, checkpoints, and sangars, in addition to segregating walls, today known as 'peace walls'. While the latter has been theorized as introducing a 'normalisation of exception' in the segregated city (Donnan & Jarman, 2017), most of the military infrastructure has been removed as part of a process of post-conflict 'transition, demilitarization and normalisation' (Donnan & Jarman, 2017).

While for most, tearing down military structures brought the gradual introduction of 'normality' to social life in Belfast, it also inflected the social rhythms of military work lives. This paper explores how those who worked for the state in a military capacity remember serving in Belfast in the context of the material transformation of the urban landscape that 'normalisation' brought to the city. I argue that individuals routinely transform places of former military infrastructures into 'everyday places of memory' (Grossman, 2019), where affective afterlives of conflict are played out. Based on a small selection of ethnographic material using car rides in the city of Belfast with former soldiers as an ethnographic research tool, I highlight how urban transformations inflect particular occupational identities and the moral qualities associated with them, complicating understandings of post-conflict 'normality' in turn.