Northern Irish Peace Process Research Articles

Northern Ireland 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement: an introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT In this introduction, we set up a theme that runs through the special issue. There are, we suggest, two dominant readings of the Northern Irish peace process – one ‘liberal,’ the other ‘nationalist’ – that see the region in the process of becoming a multicultural (neo)liberal democracy, albeit in different constitutional settings. The teleogical nature of these perspectives means, however, that they fail to grasp what is perhaps the most essential characteristic of contemporary Northern Irish society, namely its liminality. If we are to understand the true nature of post-conflict Northern Ireland, it is imperative, we contest, to grasp its quintessential ‘inbetweenness.’

The symbiosis of oral history and agonistic memory: Voices of 68 and the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland

This article offers a reflection on the potency of combining oral history and agonistic memory. Via the specific example of a recent collaboration between the author and National Museums NI on the subject of 1968, it will be argued that the symbiotic relationship between this methodological approach and theoretical underpinning provides a potentially effective response to the current and pressing challenge of managing the legacy of the Troubles as part of the Northern Irish peace process. The success of this approach in the particular and difficult context of Northern Ireland suggests that there are potential lessons for other post-conflict societies coming to terms with the challenges of their own difficult pasts.

The biopolitics of victim construction, elision and contestation in Northern Ireland and Lebanon

ABSTRACT I explore two postconflict societies – Northern Ireland and Lebanon – in regards to their different approaches to dealing with victims. While in Northern Ireland the state and other agencies have constructed a victims’ sector, Lebanon’s political elites use political amnesia to silence victims’ rights. To help conceptualize these divergent policies, I utilize two contrasting representations of the biopolitical formulated by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. While Foucault’s biopolitics provides a framework to understand how the victims’ sector and victims’ subjectivity was constructed as part of the Northern Irish peace process, Agamben’s version of the biopolitical is used to understand how victims and their families in Lebanon are rendered as ‘bare life’ and positioned within the state of exception. Despite the lack of unpredictable agency accorded by both Foucault and Agamben to biopolitical processes, complex forms of contestation – including ‘destituent resistance’ – generated by victims’ social movements are explored.

Brexit, the Border, and Political Conflict Narratives in Northern Ireland

What effect, if any, will Brexit have on the Northern Irish peace process? We consider here two ways in which Brexit may threaten the peace process. First, it undermines at least one strand of the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. By necessitating a border somewhere between the United Kingdom and Ireland, Brexit weakens either north-south or east-west relations. Second, it incentivises a resurgence in parties' conflict narratives. Because border placement ultimately indicates whether the Northern Irish territory moves towards the UK or Ireland, Brexit represents a political shock and creates an opportunity to re-open past negotiations, while parties return to and resurrect their (more latent) conflict narratives. Our research shows evidence of these trends and we give particular attention to dissident republican groups. These groups use Brexit to: stress the failure of mainstream parties' political strategies; re-open the constitutional question; challenge the EU's economic policy; and reinforce their credentials as ‘true’ republicans and revolutionaries. Such trends need not imply that large-scale violence awaits; rather, they suggest a risk that the Good Friday Agreement may partially unravel and with it, the peace process itself.

From the ‘Long War’ to the ‘Long Peace’: An introduction to the special edition

In this introduction, we set out to provide the appropriate historical context for the nine essays that follow. The article documents all of the tortuous course that the Northern Irish peace process has taken over the last two decades, but its principal focus falls on the period in which the previously unlikely pairing of Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party agreed to share power at Stormont. While the coalition partners were often at odds over ethno-national issues such flags and parades, they frequently found common cause when it came to the introduction of distinctly neoliberal social and economic strategies. The decade in which the two parties shared office seemed to offer the prospect, finally, of stable government in Northern Ireland. At the beginning of 2017, however, the tensions between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists became insurmountable and led to the Stormont institutions being mothballed for a fifth time. Although often attributed to the introduction of a controversial green energy scheme in the six counties, the collapse of the power sharing executive owes its origins rather more to seismic political developments elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The outcome of the Brexit referendum has meant that Northern Ireland is now at the centre of a political storm that threatens/promises to usher in an era of radical constitutional change for the region.

The Northern Irish Peace Process

The Northern Irish Peace Process

English Votes for English Laws

English Votes for English Laws

Framing the IRA: beyond agenda setting and framing towards a model accounting for audience influence

Coverage of Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks and the Northern Irish peace process is affected by both the country a media organisation is located and their format. The coverage of the IRA in 1996 was studied in five newspapers based in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA to reveal similarities and differences in language use, stories reported and general emphasis. The frequency of keywords was examined to show that the location a newspaper is based in affects the stories run by the newspaper. However, the format of a newspaper affects the framing of this coverage more than the location. These results were analysed through the lens of two leading theories pertaining to media–public relations: agenda-setting theory and framing theory. While both are shown to be partially useful in explaining the results, a more holistic view that accounts for public influence on media coverage would be even more useful. As a result of this narrow focus on only one part of media–public relations, the two theories do not exhibit predictive power, and further study should be conducted to expand their scope to encompass the public’s affect on media coverage.

The Lessons of the Northern Ireland Peace Process

The Northern Irish peace process has brought about a radical shift from violent conflict to relatively peaceful power-sharing between polarised political parties. Paul Dixon argues that by the mid-1980s, the war had reached a stalemate, and the Conservative and Labour governments took a ‘pragmatic realist’ approach to seeking a resolution. This involved using ‘political skills’, or deception and manipulation, to achieve an ‘honourable’ compromise with the enemy.

The principle of recognition: the people, state universality and the Good Friday Agreement

The article contributes to debates on the relationship between the state and ‘the people’ in post-national contexts, specifically those characterised by intra-state conflicts. The article critically theorises the articulation of this relationship in the Good Friday Agreement as part of the Northern Irish peace process. It employs the concept of ‘state universality’ to examine the way in which the state-people relationship is constructed on the basis of the recognition of multiple peoples, establishing the universality of the state in a postnational fashion. The article also draws on the work of Claude Lefort to examine the implications of this form in terms of political representation, arguing that the recognition of multiple peoples at stake in the Good Friday Agreement is predicated on the particularisation of the two communities, thus divesting political representation of the dimension of universality.

Performing Processes: Live Art and Irish Culture

This document explores live art in the Irish region in relation to the progression of the Northern Irish Peace Process. Through my analysis I explore the intertwining and shifting relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I suggest that ‘post-conflict’ live art enables productive interrogations of cultural histories and national identities in the Irish region that are relevant to considering the Peace Process. In particular, I explore the ‘contractual’ refusal to perform the desire for closure, enabled through the performance of repetition and a durational masochism within ‘post-conflict’ live art. I situate live art's investment in resisting completeness as useful to thinking about the Peace Process.

Transformative Aesthetics: Between Remembrance and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Irish Theatre

This article explores the ways in which two recent plays by the Tinderbox Theatre Company in Belfast – Jimmy McAleavey's The Sign of the Whale and David Ireland's Everything Between Us – engage with current political debates in Northern Ireland about how to deal with the ‘legacy of the past’. Both plays dramatise the uneasy tension between the demands for remembrance and reconciliation. I suggest that they give rise to a ‘transformative aesthetics’ that proposes an un-remembering of the past to make way for a transformative re-remembering for the future. This process, however, does not imply an easy resolution or transcendence of the antagonisms, debates, and traumatic memories. Instead, it suggests an intense and complicated engagement that sits in vexed opposition to the restorative conception of reconciliation and both a politics and a political context of ameliorative forgetting that dominates the Northern Irish Peace Process.

‘Committed to the ideals of 1916’. The language of paramilitary groups: the case of the Irish Republican Army

The objective of this article is to describe and understand the language of paramilitary groups in the Northern Irish context, taking statements issued by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as an example. In order to do so, we depart from a broad understanding of political discourse. So as to understand how beliefs, actions and the IRA existence are legitimised in those statements, Text-World Theory is combined with critical discourse analysis approaches. Chilton's notion of ‘discourse worlds’ is considered the main legitimising strategy, and these – understood as mental representations – are identified by relying on a micro-analysis of linguistic choices. Thirty-nine IRA statements delivered after the 1998 Agreement have been analysed in order to understand both synchronic responses to given socio-political events and diachronic changes related to the advances of the Northern Irish Peace process.

‘Moving On’: The Politics of Shared Society in Northern Ireland

AbstractDebates over the direction of the Northern Irish peace process have moved from decommissioning and all‐party inclusion to community relations and whether society is becoming more or less integrated and shared. This article contends that what is missing from this debate is consideration of the fact that a process of de‐politicisation is occurring – specifically, inspired by a progressivist imperative, political discourse and engagement are increasingly moving from the public sphere to more privatised concerns. I argue that that vision does not speak to the trauma of the past and that the silencings, limitations, and dilemmas it leads to are most lucidly seen in recent Northern Irish drama productions. I conclude by sketching an alternative ethical vision based on an attachment to remembering historical injustices and a repudiation of the social pressure to draw a line under the past.

The Problem of Community in a Justice System in Transition: The Case of Community Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland

The article describes how community restorative justice in Northern Ireland developed out of the civil conflict. It illustrates how its valuable work has been stifled by the reforms to the criminal justice system arising from the Northern Irish peace process. Habermas’s theory of the colonisation of the lifeworld by the system is used to explain how restorative justice tends to be marginalised or co-opted by the criminal justice system. The article concludes that any process of social reconstruction must focus as much on strengthening civil society as it does political reform and economic development.

Plying Nostrums or Exporting Peace Models? An Examination of the Contradictions Between the Northern Irish Peace Process and International Peacebuilding

The proclaimed success of the Northern Ireland peace process (NPP) has made it a model for other divided regions. Simultaneously, debate has arisen over the exact merits of the peace process and whether it can really be seen as a triumph of intercommunal accommodation. In this article I analyze what lessons the NPP may provide for modes of international peacebuilding based on the triadic structure of democratization, neoliberalism, and civil society development. I argue that the NPP should be seen as anomalous or an outlier to the common discourse of international peacebuilding as defined by the liberal peace.

Michael Mays, Nation States: The Cultures of Irish NationalismNation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism. Michael Mays. Lanham, MD, and Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. vii+225.

<i>Michael Mays,</i> Nation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism<i>Nation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism</i>. Michael Mays. Lanham, MD, and Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. vii+225.

Contested Victimhood in the Northern Irish Peace Process

I was a victim, too. Please let our next generation live normal lives. Tell them about our mistakes and admit to them our regrets. I have decided to put an end to this now. I am tired.—Billy Giles ...

(Un)settlement: Political Parody and the Northern Irish Peace Process

This essay examines Tim Loane's political comedies, Caught Red-Handed and To Be Sure, and their critique of the Northern Irish peace process. As parodies of esteem, both plays challenge the ultimate electoral victors of the peace process (the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein) as well as critiquing the cant, chicanery and cynicism that have characterised their political rhetoric and the peace process as a whole. This essay argues that Loane's transformation of these comedic pantomime horses into Trojan ones loaded with a ruthless polemical critique of our ruling political elites is all the more important in the context of a self-censoring media that has stifled dissent and debate by protecting the peace process from inconvenient truths. From these close and contextual readings of Loane's plays, wider issues relating to the political efficacy of comedy and its canonical relegation below 'higher forms' in Irish theatre historiography will also be considered.

The Ulster Unionist Victims' Movement: Political Opportunities and Injustice Masterframes

This paper provides an analysis of the origins, development and decline of the ‘Ulster Unionist victims movement’, a protest-based social movement that has developed since the inauguration of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The social movement, which represents a dense network of Protestant Unionist organisations, originated as a protest against what it viewed as discrimination meted out to Protestant Unionists during the political dispensation following the Northern Irish peace process. Utilising social movement theory to analyse the social movement, it assesses how political opportunities and cultural framing processes interact in the evolution of social movements to provide a richer and more dynamic analysis of how social movement actors change over time.