ABSTRACT
This chapter drawn from Charlotte Heath-Kelly doctoral research into the armed campaigns waged to overturn British colonial rule in Cyprus and against the neoliberal trajectory of postwar Italian politics. The re-consolidation of political authority renders some protagonists as heroes, who narrate post-conflict history to suggest that they were always destined to overcome injustice, whereas others are subjected to the identities of terrorists or enemies. Revolutions are narrated as if political authority was always-already present, through the medium of stories about impending heroes and villains who are read backwards in time. It discusses the use of tools from poststructuralist and feminist methodologies which enabled an exploration of the conditions which structure ex-militant testimony. Furthermore, drawing from trajectories of poststructuralism and literary criticism in the social sciences, narrative research allows the researcher to avoid overly agentic framings of the storyteller as the gatekeeper of narrative meaning.
