Loyalty and human rights: liminality and social action in a divided society

Abstract

With the signing of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement in 1998, human rights moved to the centre of political, legal and social activism and policy development. This contribution draws on sociological understandings of agency and social action in order to examine the role of loyalty in shaping the way community activists understand, negotiate and incorporate the language, principles and practices of human rights into their lives and activities. The research was undertaken in Belfast between 2005 and 2009. As an explicitly theorised category of experience, loyalty has often been neglected in empirical sociological work, in understanding ethno-nationalist conflict and in research on human rights. This contribution seeks to fill this significant gap in theoretical and empirical understanding.