Understanding conflicts as clouds: an exploration of Northern Irish conflict narratives

Abstract

While tragically disrupting the lives of people in specific locations, some armed conflicts have the capacity to become social, political, and cultural stakes elsewhere. Inspired by Appadurai’s conceptualization of -scapes, this article goes beyond and proposes the metaphor of ‘conflict cloud’ in order to understand armed conflicts in the context of globalization. Focusing on the circulation and production of narratives, we develop and delineate the main contributive features, processes, and actors of conflict clouds, using the Northern Irish conflict as an illustrative example. We posit that conflict narratives can be uploaded, downloaded, and uploaded again into conflict clouds by different actors globally. These actors are not always directly or indirectly involved in the concerned conflicts but can transform, frame, and exploit different meanings and symbols related to these conflicts for their particular agendas, usually tailoring them for specific audiences.