This article explores the challenges of grassroots peace-building and thirdparty interventions into protracted conflicts, through an examination of the European Union's (EU) Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Contributing over a 1 billion through a unique, decentralized funding mechanism, the EU has complemented the efforts of the British, Irish, and American governments to end the ethno-national conflict by targeting its intervention at civil society. In doing so, the EU initiative reflects the approach of conflict resolution theorists such as Lederach and Saunders, who argue that in the long run, peace can be sustained only if the efforts of elite-level politicians and (para)military leaders are reinforced by the participation and integration of ordinary citizens in the reconciliation process. We describe how the decentralized structure of the EU Programme involves civil society in addressing the structural and social-psychological sources of the conflict, but it also raises questions about whether the Programme can help disrupt long-standing patterns of ethnic animosity at the grassroots, particularly in the absence of elite-level cooperation and ethnic power-sharing.For more than a decade, Northern Ireland has been engaged in a multilevel peace process. The paramilitary ceasefires, the Good Friday Agreement, and the development of a power-sharing government riveted international attention and promised a new politics of ethnic accommodation and reconciliation. Beyond the high politics of parties and paramilitaries, however, was an equally important effort to engage in peace-building on the ground as grassroots organizations and voluntary associations mobilized, both within and across ethnic communities, to address the effects of three decades of deadly conflict. The European Union's Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation (EUSSPPR)
This paper examines the gendering of unionist national identity in Northern Ireland through an analysis of organizations that are central to unionist politics today. While the commonplace observation that unionist women are`teamakers' conveys a critical dimension of the gender order within unionism, it does not fully capture the significance of women's contributions to the establishment or maintenance of unionism. The article analyzes how Stormont constituted an ethnogender regime, examines unionist women's political engagement during the Stormont era and under direct rule, investigates how the peace process and Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement have affected the unionist ethno-gender order and the gender politics of unionism, and explores the possibilities for political transformation.
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