At Agreement 25, the event commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement hosted at Queen’s University Belfast, I watched as the leaders of each major political party in Northern Ireland gathered for a panel discussion on building peace.  

It was mildly ironic as they took their seats next to one another on stage in front of the world: Stormont hasn’t had a sitting government since I moved to Belfast in September 2022.  

Yet seeing these leaders on stage, engaging in dialogue to commemorate this important anniversary, gave me hope. Some days, it seems like these leaders and their parties still have insurmountable differences. That day, they were able to put them aside to celebrate how far Northern Ireland has come in the past 25 years. To me, this underscores a firm belief in a commitment to peace that might just supersede partisan fighting.

The week of 17 April 2023 wasn’t exactly the typical week I pictured having when I moved to Northern Ireland in September 2022 to pursue a Master’s degree in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. Yet at the same time, it was also exactly what I had envisioned.  

I was beyond fortunate to attend two days of Agreement 25, followed by three days of the annual EUROCLIO conference on teaching contested histories through the Queen’s University JETSET Award. Within a matter of days, I saw Hillary Clinton give a speech, took part in a private masterclass on conflict resolution taught by Senator George J. Mitchell, and participated in a workshop co-taught by Croatian and Serbian teachers on countering extremism in the classroom.

I spent the entire week talking about peace – how to build it, how to maintain it, how fragile it is.

Hosted in Vilnius, Lithuania, the theme of this year’s EUROCLIO conference was “The Complexity of History: Unpacking the Past.” It focused on fostering positive dialogue and teaching contested histories. EUROCLIO is an association for European history teachers, but I was quickly disillusioned of the idea that I might be the only non-European - and the only non-teacher - when the two people I sat between on the very first day were South African and American nonprofit practitioners working in the education space. This theme seemed to attract a particularly international contingent, highlighting the relevance of this topic to countries around the world.

The conference consisted of three days of panels, workshops, and site visits around Vilnius. One of the topics that kept coming up was whether it might ever be good practice not to teach histories that are extremely recent and highly controversial.

“Don’t kids deserve the chance to create new narratives that don’t revolve around conflict?” a teacher from the Balkans asked in a workshop. Her point was that none of her students were born during the 1990s. These discussions mirrored similar conversations I have had with teachers from around Northern Ireland about teaching the Troubles. With no personal memories of these conflicts, some people think, shouldn’t younger generations get the chance to start over?  Yes…but also, no.

Two days later, I was walking beneath the iron “Arbeit macht frei” gates leading into Auschwitz-Birkenau, about to tour the infamous Nazi death camp that had captured my childhood horror and fascination.  

I have been fascinated by conflict and peace from a very young age, something I’ve only recently realised I can chalk up to a complicated relationship with my German heritage. Both of my grandmothers were born in the early 1940s in Berlin, and my grandfather’s parents emigrated from Germany in the inter-war period. I grew up surrounded with stories of wartime heroism – a great grandfather who helped hundreds of Jewish people find work in other countries; a cousin who refused to report for compulsory military service and was shot in front of his family. I am extremely proud of these acts of defiance, but what has always nagged at me is what I don’t know. Most of my family lived in Germany through the war, and I fear that there are darker truths that simply aren’t being passed down to future generations for fear of shame or reprisals.  

We don’t like to talk about the darker parts of our pasts, either collective national pasts or personal pasts. It’s easier to just sweep it under the rug and hope that it gets forgotten as people die and new generations grow up unaware.

However, there is something very dangerous about not engaging in that dialogue. I would have steered clear of using the cliché that “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it” if I hadn’t seen it inscribed in a plaque in the first exhibition barrack in Auschwitz. We have to keep talking about history if we want to continue building a more peaceful world. We must be aware of the warning signs so that we can prevent mass atrocities in the future.  

One of the best presentations I saw at the EUROCLIO conference was a multi-country project in which students used place-based learning to explore the victims of national socialism in their own countries. The teachers from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Denmark talked about how their students applied what they learned from their project to today’s circumstances, particularly regarding racism. Their findings: We have to keep a historical dialogue alive so that we aren’t doomed to repeat it.

If I can impart one lesson from the Agreement 25 conference, the EUROCLIO conference, and my visit to Auschwitz, it would be to keep talking about history. It is not an easy task, but continued dialogue will enable us to build peace and maintain it for generations to come.

Whitney Westbrook is a student on the MA Conflict Transformation and Social Justice programme.  She is writing her dissertation on the challenges that peace education NGOs face in the different contexts of Cyprus and Northern Ireland.

JETSET is an award of £750 offered by the QUB Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for students studying within the Faculty, to enable them to take part in international activity during the 22/23 academic year that that will enrich their degree and support their skills development relevant to their chosen career.