scholarly journals Against Ethnicity: Democracy, Equality, and the Northern Irish Conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Prince
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Group Identities

AbstractThe study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy, led not only to conflicts but also to some of those conflicts becoming violent. Focusing on Belfast in the summer and autumn of 1969, this article sets out how the main political actors asserted competing claims to popular sovereignty and traces how multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts became arrayed around the central one.

Popular Sovereignty versus State Sovereignty: Haiti, Popular Equality and the Birth of the Neocolonial State

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110558
Author(s):  
Michael Neocosmos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global South ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Core ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Characteristics

Through a review of the two works below, I discuss how the Saint Domingue/Haiti Revolutions clarify the history of the opposition between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty. The people and the state developed as distinct political actors throughout the nineteenth century in particular. The former constructed a completely new society founded on egalitarian norms influenced by African cultures. The latter failed to establish its sovereignty and reverted to a colonial form, thus illustrating the core characteristics of the neocolonial state now widespread in the Global South in general and in Africa in particular.

scholarly journals Northern Ireland’s elusive peace dividend: Neoliberalism, austerity and the politics of class

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Coulter
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Peace Dividend ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
Economic Stagnation

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement was meant to signal an era of economic prosperity for those working-class communities that suffered most during the Troubles. Two decades on, this much vaunted ‘peace dividend’ has yet to materialise. A combination of persistent economic stagnation and the onset of austerity has ensured that the poverty and inequality that marked the era of political conflict continue to blight Northern Irish society. The introduction of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act momentarily created the conditions of the possibility of a more progressive politics premised on issues of social class. The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union would, however, close down this nascent political space and ensure the resurgence in Northern Irish public debate of those ethno-national preoccupations that animate the ‘constitutional question’.

scholarly journals Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah (2010) and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017): two plays about the Northern Troubles from outside of Northern Ireland

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Mikami
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Good Friday Agreement

During the three decades of the Troubles of Northern Ireland (1969-1998), a remarkable amount of plays about the Troubles was written and almost of them, it seems, had been ‘monopolised’ by (Northern) Irish playwrights. Recently, however, certain changes about this monopoly have been witnessed and those who do not claim themselves as Irish descendants have begun to choose the Northern Troubles as their themes. Also, there have been growing concerns about violence worldwide since 9.11. This article deals with two plays, Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, neither of which was written by an Irish playwright and examines whether and to what extent it is possible to say that they can transcend regional boundaries and become part of global memories in the context of the post-Good Friday Agreement and the post 9.11.

scholarly journals Irish on the walls: the branding of a language

2021 ◽  
Vol 06 (02) ◽  
pp. 189-205
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Rava
Keyword(s):  
City Council ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Core ◽  
The City

By the time the Belfast City Council launched a new logo in 2007, rebranding Belfast had become a central issue. The symbolic center of Belfast, the City Council building, presents itself as a post-modern and fully globalized space, neutralizing the memory of an area stigmatized by decades-long violence known as The Troubles. Like other cities with a traumatic past, such as Berlin, Belfast tries to promote itself as a modern and lively place, well aware of the importance of exploiting memory as a tourist attraction. The article examines the Irish language’s resemantization in Belfast, particularly in the Gaeltacht quarter area, during and after The Troubles. Based on a paper by Siun Carden (2017), the article tries to connect the core of the author’s observations to language’s phatic function. The idea is that the contemporary branding of Irishness through the use of the Irish language on Belfast’s murals works as an effective mythomoteur, a concept comparable to the mythe projectif elaborated by Bertrand (2019) in the case of Paris’s rebranding.

‘Britain's Irish Question: Britain's European Question?’ British-Irish relations in the context of European Union and The Belfast Agreement

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH MEEHAN
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Irish Question ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Eu

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.

The emergence of the idea of ‘the welfare state’ in British political discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110344
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Core ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Subsequent Integration ◽  
The Welfare State

This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: (a) the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; (b) the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and (c) the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe.

Uncertain Combinations

2018 ◽  
pp. 73-101
Author(s):  
David A. Bateman ◽  
Ira Katznelson ◽  
John S. Lapinski
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Core ◽  
National Representation ◽  
Democratic Parties ◽  
Democrats And Republicans

This chapter visits the internal tensions within the various southern Democratic parties, which successfully united competing factions around the cause of white supremacy but whose unity was always tense and insecure. It begins by detailing the process of “redemption,” in which the Democratic Party across the South wrested control of state legislatures and national representation from biracial coalitions organized primarily within the Republican Party. It then examines the structure of political conflict in Congress, the site where southern diversity was transformed into regional solidarity, to show that the familiar story of the Black Belt as the core of southern solidarity must be revised. Turning to the substantive bases for southern unity and diversity, the chapter identifies the issue areas that implicated distinctively southern priorities and arrayed the region's members in diverse coalitions with northern Democrats and Republicans. From this set, it selects for detailed examination legislation that reflected competing intraregional priorities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document