1. The Northern Ireland peace process has been hailed as promising a radical transition of a society marked by violent conflict to one dedi- cated ‘to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all’, as Paragraph 2 of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement envisages it. 1 This narrative of conflict transformation has given rise to, and is in turn underpinned by, a fundamental paradigm shift in the conceptualiza- tion(s) of the politico-social environment. The issue of dealing with the past forms a constant theme and, as such, incorporates and is ampli- fied in and by discourses about justice and identity. On the one hand, there has been a shift from an emphasis on retributive notions of justice to restorative practices; on the other – and simultaneously – there has been a decisive alteration in the characterization of identities and identifications: that is, a movement away from previously hege- monic categories, which were often associated with aggression, violence and militarization towards alternative subjectivities. Ernesto Verdeja has suggested that the success of conflict transformation processes and practices is indicated by the extent to which these ‘previous, conflict-era identities no longer operate as the primary cleavages in politics, and thus citizens acquire new identities that cut across those earlier fault lines’. 2 This promotion of ‘new identities’ and means of identifications is underwritten by a certain temporal logic that aims to recast the present ‘as a point of origin’ for a new future. 3 Such a constitutive moment is announced by the emphasis on a ‘new start’ in the Belfast Agreement; a trope that was putatively hoped to be visually captured Post-Conflict Masculinities: Filiative Reconciliation in Five Minutes of Heaven and David Park’s The Truth Commissioner Stefanie Lehner 4 MagennisMullenIntro01-05:JeffreyBlythGrid.qxd 26/05/2011 15:49 Page 65