Afterword

摘要

I was asked to write the 'Afterward' for this collection. Perhaps that should really have been after words or aftermaths such is the dizzying array of articles and opinions on display here: a feast for all those seeking to make sense of one hundred years of history, politics and passions after the partition of Ireland. Let me be clear though that there is no consensus here, no tribalism, no advocacy of any specific posture but in many cases a careful, if a rather cautious, perhaps even equivocal, approach to this calamitous century. I will come back to this idea of equivocation but let me start by saying that the journal Small Wars is to be congratulated on a number of fronts. The first is that the very label 'Small Wars' associated with Colonel Callwell (and his now unfashionable and unforgivable treatment of imperial peoples) is one that sits uneasily with many. Indeed Tarak Barkawi's scathing essay 'On the Pedagogy of Small Wars' published in International Affairs alerted us in powerful terms to all that was deemed wrong with the label Small Wars: its lack of cognisance of the suffering of the people on the receiving end of violence, the problem of scale - what is small and what is big - and the inevitable human consequences of such wars. Then of course there is the thorny issue of empire. Yet, and this is precisely my point, the label perfectly describes any number of the encounters that the British state has been engaged in for much of its modern history.