By continuing to use this site, you agree to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy.

Social Science and Public Policy

The Troubles and Beyond. The Impact of a Museum Exhibit on a Post-Conflict Society

April 7, 2023 at 12:00pm1:30pm

Eggers Hall, 341

This event has already occurred. The information may no longer be valid.

The Moynihan Institute, and the program for Comparative Politics / International Relations is pleased to host Laia Balcells, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her co-author Elsa Voytas, assistant professor of political science at IE University’s School of Global and Public Affairs in Madrid, Spain; and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, will unfortunately not be in attendance.

Can museums influence the way visitors think about past violence and modern-day politics? Although the impacts of symbolic transitional justice (TJ) policies such as museums have largely been overlooked, we hypothesize that they can shape perceptions of groups involved in violence; and preferences toward public policies to address the past. In cases where museums recount multi-sided violence, reconstructing the conflict can be a difficult and complex undertaking—if museums are a reminder of past discord or are perceived as biased, they might reinforce prior beliefs and heighten societal divisions. In May 2022, we conducted a field experiment at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where sectarian violence during the Troubles (1968-1998) periodically erupted between largely Catholic republicans and predominantly Protestant unionists. We randomly assigned a sample of university students to visit one of two exhibits in the same museum: a treatment exhibit (Troubles and Beyond, recounting the Troubles-era violence) or a placebo exhibit (Elements, a natural science exhibit about the periodic elements). We measure visitors’ attitudinal shifts and gauge persistence of the effects for the following six months through follow-up surveys. We complement the results from the field experiment with a survey experiment embedded in a regionally-representative survey in Northern Ireland. Our results suggest that while symbolic TJ policies have little effect on attitudes in post-civil war settings, they might polarize some social groups along the master cleavage of the conflict.

Laia Balcells is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. She was an assistant professor of political science at Duke University (2012-2017), and a Niehaus Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (2015-16). Her research and teaching are at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. She focuses on issues of security, peace and conflict, with a special interest in civil wars, terrorism, nationalism and ethnic conflict, and transitional justice after conflict. Her first book, “Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War,” was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics).

This event was first published on March 16, 2023 and last updated on March 31, 2023.


Event Details