Sectarianism In Scotland Research Articles

Sectarianism in Scotland: A ‘West of Scotland’ Problem, a Patchwork or a Cobweb?

Sectarianism in Scotland: A ‘West of Scotland’ Problem, a Patchwork or a Cobweb?

Women as Sectarian Agents: Looking Beyond the Football Cliché in Scotland

In this article the authors challenge the hegemonic masculinity of the dominant football discourses on intra-Christian sectarianism in Scotland through a pilot study on women’s everyday experiences of sectarianism. The authors argue that dominant constructions of sectarianism often erase the standpoints of different kinds of women by minimising their roles both as agents for change and/or subjects who also reproduce sectarianism in their own right. The findings offer alternative narratives which problematise sectarianism as a white, male-only, working-class issue. This highlights the need to legitimise different gendered manifestations of sectarian bigotry at the micro-social level of family and kinship networks particularly in relation to the seemingly feminised role of policing ethno-religious identities in marriage and the socialisation and upbringing of children.

Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland

The Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland (AGoTS) was established in August 2012 to provide Scottish Ministers with impartial advice on how to develop and assess work to tackle sectarianism in Scotland. Key to the Group's work was understanding the forms that sectarianism may (or may not) take in contemporary Scotland, and how best to address these. This article sets out an overview of the Group, as well as outlining the key contours of this Special Issue of Scottish Affairs.

The Sectarian Iceberg?

This article situates the contemporary evidential position on Scotland's sectarianism within some longer-term and ongoing debates. It does so by addressing three key aspects of sectarianism in Scotland. Firstly it explores long-standing concerns about sectarianism in Scotland, and the puzzle that sectarianism frequently seems to be someone else's problem. It then outlines some central evidential claims made about sectarianism in the 1980s and why our increasing knowledge about religion in Scotland's social structure appear to bear them out. Finally, the article concludes by questioning how far we can conceive of ‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’ as divided in the personal, informal and intimate spheres of contemporary Scottish life.

Sectarianism in Scotland: A ‘West of Scotland’ Problem, a Patchwork or a Cobweb?

Drawing on research carried out for the Scottish Government in 2014, this article explores how people experience sectarianism in Scotland today. For some, sectarianism is manifestly part of their everyday experience, but for others it is almost invisible in their social world. The article sets out a metaphor of sectarianism experienced like a cobweb in Scotland; running strongly down the generations and across masculine culture particularly, but experienced quite differently by different people depending on their social relationships. Using the examples of song and marching, the article suggests that sectarian prejudice should be conceived of as much as a cultural phenomenon as in social and legal terms. A multidisciplinary and intergenerational approach to tackling sectarian prejudice would help emphasise its cultural and relational construction. Much can also be learned from examining the broader research on prejudice worldwide, rather than treating Scottish sectarianism as if it is a unique and inexplicable quality of the national character.

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

This article reviews the research agenda of the Scottish Government's Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism and what it has added to our understanding of sectarianism in Scotland. It takes a broad overview of the research, and the issues it seeks to impact upon. Sectarianism, it concludes, is about the hard politics of difference, and requires Scotland to confront who we are and who we would like to become.

Sectarianism and State Funded schooling in Scotland. A critical response to the Final Report of the Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland

The Scottish Government has recently invested considerable energy and resource into tackling sectarianism in Scotland. They have commissioned reviews of existing research, commissioned new research and funded community based projects. They also appointed an independent Advisory Group in 2012 to investigate the scope of sectarianism and provide some recommendations on how to address sectarianism. This article is focused on the Final Report of the Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland - April 2015 (Scottish Government, 2015a) and the key statements in this Final Report that refer to state funded school education. The article argues that there is much to commend in the Final Report and provides a critical examination of the discussion of the relationship between school education and sectarianism and the contribution of school education to antisectarian activities and education.

Scotland's Sectarianism Problem: Irish Answers?

A series of developments during the 2010–11 football season has led to an intense public debate over the question of the nature and extent of religious sectarianism in Scotland. The Scottish National Party (SNP) government has responded with a new piece of legislation which has been widely criticised and has prompted some commentators to speculate about a political ‘own goal’. This article provides a guide to the debate around sectarianism and its historical and political dimensions. It also suggests that the Irish roots of the problem in Scotland should be properly acknowledged, and that a possible way forward could involve cooperation between Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland within the structures and procedures of the British–Irish Council (BIC).

Catholic Schools and Sectarianism in Scotland: Educational Places and the Production and Negotiation of Urban Space

This article explores the role of state-funded Catholic schools in debates about the causes and manifestations of sectarianism in Scotland. It suggests that debates between proponents and opponents of state-funded Catholic schools (and indeed faith schools more generally) have been largely aspatial, focusing on the teaching ethos within schools - empirically weak conceptions of the impacts of segregated schooling on social networks, and abstract national-level accounts of religion, ethnicity, identity and belonging. The article argues for a focus upon the productive power of schools as place nodes within a network of urban spaces and the agency of pupils in identity and friendship construction. It suggests the need to recognise the specifics of the social, spatial and political national and local contexts within which faith schools are situated. It concludes with an examination of educational policy responses to sectarianism in Scotland, arguing that they have focused on disrupting the spatial ordering of faith schools in an attempt to realign the physical boundaries of segregation and the visibility of difference in urban space.

Gangs, Sectarianism and Social Capital

In recent years, there has been continuing debate about the extent and significance of sectarianism in Scotland and the wider links with territorial gang culture. This article focuses on a small qualitative study conducted in some of the most deprived urban communities in Glasgow. Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with 10 youth workers and 40 young persons (aged 16—18 years), with follow-up interviews conducted with senior operational police officers. Social capital indicators generated by recent research were used as a lens through which to explore the participant responses. The findings suggest that the combined social forces associated with territoriality and intense football rivalry limit the young people’s potential for maximizing social capital. However, the extent to which these issues can be fully ascribed to the continued existence of sectarianism in Scotland is less clear. The article concludes with some implications for further sociological debate around these issues.

Governing Sectarianism in Scotland

In January 2006 the Scottish Executive 1 published an Action Plan on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland (Scottish Executive 2006a). In the same month, the Respect Task Force, based in the Home Office, published the Respect Action Plan 'broadening, deepening and furthering' attempts to tackle anti-social behaviour in England and Wales (Respect Task Force 2006, p.7). Both documents identified their respective social problems as priorities for government intervention, set out wideranging proposals and were ultimately aimed at achieving a cultural change in (sections of) the population. Both of these action plans may be placed within the wider quest for social cohesion and the reaffirmation of civic and national identity in multicultural societies that has emerged as a governmental priority in several Western European states, including France, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Religious discrimination in Scotland: A rebuttal of Bruce et al.'s claim that sectarianism is a myth

A recent article on sectarianism in Scotland in Ethnic and Racial Studies by Bruce et al. sought to undermine the conclusions of a previous paper of ours, also published in this journal. Bruce et al. contend that sectarianism is a myth, while we have provided new qualitative evidence for personal experience of anti-Catholic discrimination in employment, which clearly contradicts their thesis. To contextualize these papers, we have summarized some of the key points of the evidence, and of the increasing concern about sectarianism in Scotland. In an effort to ridicule this concern, Bruce has attacked us as he has previously attacked a number of others. He and his co-authors accuse us of relying on respondents’ fallible judgements about the actual and appropriate proportions of Catholics in workplaces; then they try to interpret some of our respondents’ statements and their own quantitative evidence as supporting their myth hypothesis. We document here the process of misrepresentation by which they have sought to support their allegations, and we re-affirm the actual argument which led to our conclusions. We suggest a more obvious alternative interpretation of their own quantitative data, while raising misgivings about their use of 2001 census data. Questions about sectarian discrimination in Glasgow in the period 1950–2000 can no longer be baulked.

‘Diasporic Otherness’: racism, sectarianism and ‘national exteriority’ in modern Scotland

This article examines the twin problems of racism and sectarianism in Scotland, exploring everyday experiences of them, the geographical bases of their production and their relationship to the wider Scottish society. I use qualitative interview and ethnographic research from Scotland, carried out in 2001, to examine these issues, arguing that they can be usefully considered together, within a framework focusing on diasporic belonging, hybridity and difference. These areas help uncover the positionalities of the groups involved, relative to each other and to Scotland, as well as the processes through which different minority groups are Othered and exteriorized whilst simultaneously (if differentially) embedded within Scottish/British society. Referring these issues to the ongoing political processes in post-devolution Scotland, ambivalences of belonging and desire can be identified which serve to complicate diasporic identities, which make both problems particularly intractable, and which pose questions for the construction of an inclusive ‘civic’ identity in Scotland.

Challenging Sectarianism in Scotland: The Prism of Racism

This article is an essay in change in attitudes to sectarian prejudice, drawing on the Herald and other Scottish newspapers in order to identify key developments in the three years between 1999 and 2002. In June 1999, Cara Henderson's published a passionate letter of protest against sectarian hatred in football, in August James Macmillan gave his renowned lecture about anti-Catholic bigotry . In November 2002, Jack McConnell, First Minister, called in the giant football clubs the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers to demand that they take concerted action against the violence of their supporters, and threw his weight behind proposals to make 'religious prejudice* an aggravating factor in crime. It was inevitable that the new Scottish authorities would, at some time, face challenge about sectarianism, the component in Scotland's political culture that is more sensitive than any other. It was also inevitable that they would have to deal, at some time, with the scale of violence that surrounds Celtic and Rangers, the giant football clubs in Glasgow, each with their distinctively sectarian affiliations (Finn 2000). However, what is interesting about these three years is the development of centripetal pull. Politicians who stood aside in 1999 were pulled towards the centre of a momentum that was gathering pace.

Secretarianism and Municipal Housing Allocation in Glasgow

This article assesses whether or not sectarian practices existed in the allocation of municipal housing in Glasgow during the inter-war and post­ war periods of the twentieth century. Population and parish data, and previously unpublished local government material, are examined to assist in an investigation that has not been considered in the previous research on sectarianism in Scotland. The public debate hosted by the broadsheet letters1 pages following James MacMilian*s infamous 'Scotland's Shame* lecture was welcome for two reasons. First, it showed that plenty of people were prepared to share their thoughts on the subjects of religious bigotry and sectarianism, albeit with the aid of an unexpected stimulus. Second, given the amount of anecdote presented, it was a timely reminder that research into the extent of sectarianism in Scotland was still very much necessary. An edited collection of essays was produced as a direct consequence of the reaction MacMillan's lecture had provoked (Devine (ed) 2000), itself an important addition to the growing number of key texts in this area (Murray 1984, Bruce 1985, Gallagher 1987, Walker and Gallagher (eds) 1990, Devine (ed) 1991, Bradley 1995, Walker 1995; Boyle and Lynch 1998). Most of the essays directly addressed MacMillan's claims of endemic anti-Catholic hatred and discrimination in Scotland, with some attempting to quantify the relative social status, educational attainment, political preferences and cultural habits of Catholics in post-war Scotland (L. Paterson, McCrone and Rosie, I. Paterson, Williams and Walls). Research into discrimination and

‘And if you know your History…’ An Examination of the Formation of Football Clubs in Scotland and Their Role in the Construction of Social Identity

This paper provides an overview of how the processes through which specific football clubs were established in Scotland operated interdependently with the processes of identity construction. It is acknowledged that this paper does not provide any new primary evidence to an already wellresearched area. However, rather than offering a new perspective to the debate, the explicit aim of this contribution is to provide a review of recent research into football and sectarianism in Scotland, and to conceptualise the topic within this literature. In this respect, this paper synthesises the material on the development of football clubs in Scotland and places it directly within the context of majority/minority inter-group relations (that is, indigenous Scots and migrant Irish communities) in early twentieth century Scotland. In particular, by examining the establishment of teams based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee, all of which housed significant Irish communities, the objective is to examine both how and why particular clubs have developed and become associated with particular social groups and identities, and why these clubs were adopted (consciously or subconsciously) as vehicles for the expression of social identity.