Northern Ireland Peace Research Articles

Beyond identity lines: women building peace in Northern Ireland and the Korean peninsula

This article explores the challenges and contributions of women in building and sustaining peace in protracted conflicts by conducting a comparative case study on Northern Ireland and Korea. Similarities in the histories of the conflicts and the concurrences in the peace processes have been attracting policy makers and researchers to share lessons between the Northern Ireland and Korean peace processes. However, the peacebuilding role of women and their transversal perspective have not yet received significant attention compared to the high-level agreements, signed predominantly by male politicians. This article identifies the similarities in the peacebuilding activities of women in Northern Ireland and Korea, in terms of their recognition of the interconnection between identity politics and patriarchy, building relationships across the divide through transversal dialogue, and initiating nonviolent peace movements against the militarism of their societies. The comparative case study also shows dissimilarities between the two cases, with regard to the freedom of women to move beyond boundaries, and being part of the official peace process. This article concludes the role of women in both contexts is a key element in sustainable peacebuilding; however, it appears that women’s peacebuilding would not be able to reach its full potential to break down violent structures in conflict-affected societies, as long as their transversal perspective remains at the level of social movement, not part of peacebuilding at all levels of societies, including high-level negotiations.

Sharing Lessons between Peace Processes: A Comparative Case Study on the Northern Ireland and Korean Peace Processes

In both Northern Ireland and Korea, the euphoria following significant breakthroughs towards peace in the late 1990s and early 2000s turned into deep frustration when confronted by continuous stalemates in implementing the agreements. I explore the two peace processes by examining and comparing the breakthroughs and breakdowns of both, in order to identify potential lessons that can be shared for a sustainable peace process. Using a comparative case study, I demonstrate the parallels in historical analyses of why the agreements in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Northern Ireland and Korea were expected to be more durable than those of the 1970s. I also examine the differences between the two peace processes in the course of addressing major challenges for sustaining the two processes: disarmament; relationships between hard-line parties; cross-community initiatives. These parallels and differences inform which lessons can be shared between Northern Ireland and Korea to increase the durability of the peace processes. The comparative case study finds that the commitment of high-level leadership in both conflict parties to keeping negotiation channels open for dialogue and to allowing space for civic engagement is crucial in a sustainable peace process, and that sharing lessons between the two peace processes can be beneficial in finding opportunities to overcome challenges and also for each process to be reminded of lessons from its own past experience.

Reflecting on the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process: 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement

Reflecting on the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process: 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement

The frame changers: journalists, the conflict, and peace process

ABSTRACTThis paper explores some of journalists’ struggles in gathering and framing news during the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. Based on interviews with eight journalists who covered both periods, it details how they navigated what has been called a ‘propaganda war’ or what I call ‘frame wars’ that ran parallel with the physical conflict. These frame wars became complicating factors with which journalists grappled when seeking to produce meaningful news that fit both their professional standards and their own humanity. The processes that they revealed offers a window into three levels of social construction: First, on the level of the individual, journalists – like all people – come to understand political realities from a barrage of competing information, frames, and narratives. The journalists’ humanity arising from real experiences interacted with professional expectations to deliver news. Secondly, while traditional media’s norms, structures, and ideologies shaped newsgathering and story framing, their jobs were complicated by opposing narratives, choice of language, and subjects. Third, group dynamics and peer pressure influenced some journalists’ reportage. Placed within the context of the political communication literature, the interviews reveal thought processes among some leading journalists about the difficulties of reporting in a divided society.

Narratives of Identity in the Northern Irish Troubles

This study examines the manners in which individuals and organizations used historical narratives to justify images of themselves and of the other, contributing both to the outbreak of the Troubles and the difficulty in resolving the conflict. The role of cultural identity formation through symbolic interpretation creates a backdrop that colors struggles over access to political and economic resources and assists in either fomenting conflict or fostering the peaceful resolution of differences. Despite the relative success of the Good Friday Agreement, I argue that many of Northern Ireland's identity narratives persist and continue to provide a fertile ground to interpret new conflicts through the old lens of identity conflicts. Understanding the construction of these identity narratives and how they contributed to the conflict may provide avenues for identity reconstruction, which may assist in making Northern Ireland's peace more durable.

Beyond the walls: Dismantling Belfast's conflict architecture

Since the first paramilitary ceasefires in 1994, the Northern Ireland peace and political processes have addressed a series of sensitive and contentious issues synonymous with the conflict, such as policing, prisoner releases, decommissioning and power sharing. However, one issue that has been absent from these transformative processes has been that of the peace walls, which were first constructed by the British Army in 1969 as a military response to sectarian violence and disorder. There are now over 60 such physical barriers and walls dominating the landscape of working-class communities in Belfast. Ironically, a significant number of these have been constructed or strengthened after the cessations in violence and introduction of power sharing arrangements in government. This reality of fortified segregation sits uneasily with the popular narrative of the peace process in Northern Ireland and its successes. With this in mind, this paper uses primary quantitative research to ascertain the factors that influence the public's perception and interpretation of the peace walls, with the understanding that these findings can support the development and implementation of policies aimed to transform the conflict architecture.

The Problem with Northern Ireland's Peace Walls

Despite the successes of the Northern Ireland peace process, many Protestant and Catholic communities are still physically divided from one another. Cathy Gormley-Heenan and Jonny Byrne report on attitudes towards the ‘peace walls’ and assess the prospects for their eventual removal.

The (Soft) Power of Commitment: The EU and Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the potential of international actors to contribute to conflict resolution by analysing the evolving role of the European Union (EU) in embedding Northern Ireland's peace process. Scrutiny of the EU's approach to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland offers useful insights into the scope and potential of soft power for facilitating behavioural change from governmental to grass-roots levels. This paper traces the development of the EU's approach to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland from one concentrated on encouraging state-level agreement, to nurturing peace through multilevel funding, through now to consolidating the peace by facilitating regional-level empowerment. The core argument is that, in sum, the most critical element of the EU's contribution to peace in Northern Ireland has been, quite simply, that of enduring commitment.

Political reverberations: Northern Ireland's conflict, peace process and paramilitaries

After years of violence, which resulted in the deaths of more than 3600 people, the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998 between the British and Irish governments and endorsed by the ma...

To cajole or compel? The use of incentives and penalties in Northern Ireland's peace process

The peace process in Northern Ireland lurched from crisis to crisis for almost a decade after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. This article examines the tools the British Government employed in seeking a breakthrough that would bring about the stable devolved government that was the goal of the Agreement. It demonstrates how the government's approach oscillated between seeking to cajole/persuade the parties to agree to share power by the use of incentives and concessions (carrots) and seeking to compel them to do so by the use of sanctions and penalties (sticks). The article demonstrates the problems with both approaches and argues that in Northern Ireland they were often applied in an inconsistent and counterproductive manner. The article demonstrates that their overuse in Northern Ireland led to parties becoming more willing to undertake brinkmanship once it was clear that threatened penalties may not actually be applied if parties failed to comply with ultimatums. Drawing from the Northern Ireland case the article offers an examination of the wider usefulness and limitations of carrots and sticks in peace processes.

Civil Society Leaders and Northern Ireland's Peace Process: Hopes and Fears for the Future

This article explores the interview narratives of 98 Northern Irish participants (consisting of NGO and community group leaders, development officers, and civil servants responsible for funding grassroots peacebuilding work) regarding their hopes and fears for the future. These civil society leaders expressed a wide variety of hopes and fears addressing both the micro grassroots and the macro political levels of society. An analysis of these expressed hopes and fears is both instructive and significant. Civil society peacebuilding actors have been given significant voice in the Northern Ireland peace process. The findings reveal significant hope that reconciliation work at the grassroots level will be successful, but conversely, they also reveal noticeable fear regarding the political peace process and the resumption of political violence.

Writing as a Citizen?

■ This article traces a series of frustrations and dilemmas that arose from people's attempts to participate in Northern Ireland's peace process in ways that challenged the reduction of its politics to a single line of conflict. As attempts to expand the possibilities for active citizenship, they were not entirely successful. However, the article argues that dilemmas offer privileged access to contradictions and conflicts at work within both political actors and the scene of their actions. The dilemmas explored here are examined for what they can reveal about the political culture of the peace process and the prospects for democratic life after the Good Friday Agreement. Some of these problems emerged as a result of the author's partisan involvement in the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, one of the parties to the 1996—8 peace talks. As such, this article also asks how participation in the peace process might contribute to the ethnographic record of the peace process.

The Northern Ireland Peace Process and the War against Terrorism: Conflicting Conceptions?

AbstractPreserving Northern Ireland's peace process in the midst of a war against international terrorism has presented the British government with a series of dilemmas at the level of political rhetoric, policy-making and legislation. The peace process demands adherence to human rights standards to provide a foundation for the new political dispensation, while an implication of the necessity for a war against terrorism is that restrictions on liberty are justifiable in the name of security against the backdrop of the existence of an emergency. These conflicting conceptions for addressing political violence at the national and international level are addressed.

Engendering Democratic Transition from Conflict: Women's Inclusion in Northern Ireland's Peace Process

In 1998 Good Friday Agreement promised an end to protracted conflict in Northern Ireland through establishment of new political structures to ensure eth nic power sharing.' Much has been written about politics of peace process, challenges of demilitarization, and suspension of power-sharing assembly. Less attention has been paid to agreement's explicit commitment that signa tories pursue broad of social inclusion through measures to support com munity development and the advancement of women in public life. Since 2003 assembly elections have reinvigorated radical wings of Unionist and Nationalist camps, through successes of Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's new political institutions may be vulnerable. So, too, are broad policies of social inclusion that Good Friday Agreement promulgated. An examination of Northern Ireland offers an opportunity to explore a political context, protracted ethnonational conflict that has been undertheorized in studies of gender and democratic transitions. Feminist scholarship has provided a wealth of knowledge about women's inclusion in transitions from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, especially in Latin America, eastern Europe and former Soviet Union.2 In particular, it has identified three factors that are crucial to women's ability to spring from civic activism to formal politics: structure of political opportunities and availability of resources; responsiveness of political parties to inclusion agenda; and extent of women's activism in civil society and women's ability to transfer their human and organizational resources to formal politics. Investigation of Northern Ireland can help to clarify whether processes of conflict resolution, like transitions from authoritarian rule, open opportunities for women to take advantage of their positions in civil society, mobilize on behalf of women's interests, and even spring into politics, or whether politics of ethnonationalism undermine gender activism. Hence Northern Ireland may provide insight into a range of cases of pro tracted ethnonational conflict (such as Basque Country, Cyprus, Israel, and Sri Lanka) where limited democratic traditions have combined with acute national con flict and may enrich analyses of gender politics of transitions more broadly. Building on feminist and mainstream scholarship from fields of ethnic con flict, nationalism, and democratization, this article explores gendering of formal

Public Attitudes toward Partisan and Neutral Symbols in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland

Using original data from the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, this article assesses public attitudes toward key issues of symbolism intimately connected with the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. It uses public attitudes toward the symbolic expressions of Northern Ireland's politico-religious blocs as indicators of the extent of intercommunity tolerance in the delicate post-Belfast Agreement period. Survey questions on attitudes toward flags, including the idea of a new flag for Northern Ireland; loyalist and republican murals; and memorials to the dead of the conflict, including the idea of a memorial for all of the victims of the conflict, reveal that partisan attitudes toward communal symbols of identity and commemoration persist, despite macro-level political changes heralded by the 1998 peace accord. It is argued that the consociational design of the Belfast Agreement facilitates the perpetuation of the single-identity politics of Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism. In this context, public attachment to partisan symbols remains strong.

Guns and Government: The Management of the Northern Ireland Peace Process

List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: A New Departure? PART I: THE PEACE PROCESS: A NARRATIVE The Background to the Peace Process Negotiating the Deal Good Friday and After PART II: THE PEACE PROCESS: ANALYSIS Swinging Door: The Politics and Negotiations of the Peace Process Guns and Government: Violence and the Peace Process Third Parties: External Influences on the Peace Process Peace Dividends and Peace Deficits: The Economics of the Peace Process On the Ground: Public Opinion and the Peace Process Poppies and Lilies: Symbolism and the Peace Process Conclusion: A Broader Perspective on Northern Ireland's Peace Process Bibliography Index

Comparatively peaceful: The role of analogy in Northern Ireland's peace process

Comparatively peaceful: The role of analogy in Northern Ireland's peace process

Northern Ireland's Peace Movement: Some early reactions

Journal Article Northern Ireland's Peace Movement: Some early reactions Get access EILEEN EVASON EILEEN EVASON Lecturer in Social Administration at the New University of Ulster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Community Development Journal, Volume 12, Issue 2, April 1977, Pages 108–111, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/12.2.108 Published: 01 April 1977