This book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the conflict in Northern Ireland, providing a rigorous analysis of its dynamics and present structure and proposing a new approach to its resolution. It deals with historical process, communal relations, ideology, politics, economics and culture and with the wider British, Irish and international contexts. It reveals at once the enormous complexity of the conflict and shows how it is generated by a particular system of relationships which can be precisely and clearly described. The book proposes an emancipatory approach to the resolution of the conflict, conceived as the dismantling of this system of relationships. Although radical, this approach is already implicit in the converging understandings of the British and Irish governments of the causes of conflict. The authors argue that only much more determined pursuit of an emancipatory approach will allow an agreed political settlement to emerge.
This article criticizes two theoretical strategies of approach to ethnicity and ethnic conflict and proposes an alternative. One strategy emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic or ethno-national bond and the resistance to change of the communities thus formed; it explains these phenomena in terms of the deep feeling surrounding the quasi-kin sense of ethnicity. The other strategy emphasizes the contingency, situatedness, variability, even superficiality of ethnic feeling, and shows how the emergent and unstable linkages which constitute ethnic 'groups' are formed from an interplay of ethnic categories and ethnic entrepreneurs within a given institutional and legal context. We adopt an alternative theoretical strategy, seeing ethnicity as a product of a multiplicity of determinants rather than a simple essence, and locating it as one factor among many, which, depending on the tightness or looseness of their interlinkages and mutual feedback mechanisms, may form a path dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict.
The implementation of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement has been marked by recurring crises. While each of these has its specific causes, they are symptomatic of contradictions in the underlying conditions of conflict. These made the Belfast Agreement possible, but they also create difficulties in its implementation. The Agreement echoes -not least in its ambiguities -the underlying contradictions, reconstituting the political terrain in terms of them. This has reproduced the tendency toward conflict even among the supporters of the Agreement, whose different responses and ends-in-view reflect the objective uncertainties in the situation. Political crises are likely to continue even after the full implementation of the Agreement.The implementation of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement has met with recurring crises. These were already prefigured in the negotiations themselves, in particular in the refusal of the second largest unionist party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to participate in them. At the time the Agreement was signed, however, many looked forward to a radical diminution in the intensity of the conflict and to the advent of a new form of politics in Northern Ireland, one based on the acceptance of difference and cooperation in the pursuit of shared goals. The hoped-for new politics has not yet emerged: instead the implementation of the Agreement has been accompanied by radically different interpretations of its provisions, together with delays and blockages on core issues. More than once, the entire future of the Agreement has been in doubt.This raises an important question, one which has hung over the Agreement virtually from the outset: are these crises a matter of transition, destined to disappear as the new reconciliatory politics take hold, or are they already the new form of politics -less violent than in the past, but no less conflictual and crisis-ridden? One might attempt to address this question by examining in detail the factors that have precipitated the crises (the failure to disarm, the resistance to police reform, Orange marches) and assessing their potential for resolution. We adopt a different strategy. We focus on the underlying structural conditions of conflict. We identify the changes in those conditions that made possible the peace process and the Belfast Agreement. We ask whether those changes have been sufficient to bring the conflict to an end. We assess the extent to which the crises of implementation are the product of unresolved old -or new -structural conditions.
The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.