Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland (review)

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-618
Author(s):  
Candler Hallman
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics

scholarly journals Are refugees really welcome? Understanding Northern Ireland attitudes towards Syrian refugees

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cameron D Lippard ◽  
Catherine B McNamee
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Ethnic History ◽  
Ethnic Competition ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
Social Exposure

Abstract In 2018, Northern Ireland (NI) government officials, journalists, and preliminary research declared that NI citizens had provided a ‘welcoming society’ to Syrian refugees settling in local communities across the country. However, this claim starkly contrasted with other reports of growing violence towards foreign-born groups, particularly Muslims, which lead to NI being identified as the ‘Race Hate Capital of Europe.’ Using the 2015 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT), we problematize and empirically-test these initial conclusions about NI attitudes towards Syrian refugees by testing four prominent social theories. We first examine whether economic self-interest and social exposure (i.e., contact hypothesis) predict NI attitudes towards Syrian refugees. We also recognize NI's unique conflictual ethnic history by testing whether cultural marginality and ethnic competition theories further explain attitudes. The findings suggest that multiple theories explain NI citizen views towards Syrians. Results provide partial support for economic self-interests and direct and preferential social exposure as predictors. However, when considering racism and sectarianism measures, the results require a nuanced understanding of the context of NI people’s attitudes. We found that identity politics related to NI's citizens' religious and nationalist identity encouraged racist and sectarian disapproval of Syrian refugee resettlement. These findings provide a promising avenue of study in understanding how ethno-identities shape attitudes towards Syrian refugees and other foreign-born groups living in NI. However, we contend more granular research will be needed to highlight these nuances.

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

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Jin Kim
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
High Level

Abstract 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.

5. The twenty-first century

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-120
Author(s):  
Marc Mulholland
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sinn Fein ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Good Friday Agreement ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

‘The twenty-first century’ explains how the Good Friday Agreement saw considerable institutional restructuring in Northern Ireland. An Assembly was elected in 1998, with a power-sharing government, with David Trimble of the UUP as First Minister and Seamus Mallon of the SDLP as Deputy First Minister operating between 1998 and 2001. Between 2001 and 2007, the power-sharing government collapsed and the DUP and Sinn Féin succeeded in becoming the main political parties for their respective communities. The 2006 St Andrews Agreement brought the extremes together. The power-sharing government collapsed once more in 2017 when Sinn Féin withdrew. Identity politics in Northern Ireland and the impact of Brexit on the Northern Ireland question are also discussed.

scholarly journals Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Gormley-Heenan ◽  
Arthur Aughey
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The People ◽  
Waking Up ◽  
The Mind

For those who spoke on behalf of Leave voters, the result on 23 June 2016 meant the people of the United Kingdom were taking back ‘control’ or getting their ‘own country back’. However, two parts of the United Kingdom did not vote Leave: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here, the significant counterpoint to ‘taking back control is “waking up in a different country”’, and this sentiment has unique political gravity. Its unique gravity involves two distinct but intimately related matters. The first concerns the politics of identity. The vote was mainly, if not entirely, along nationalist/unionist lines, confirming an old division: unionists were staking a ‘British’ identity by voting Leave, and nationalists an Irish one by voting Remain. The second concerns borders. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998 meant taking the border out of Irish politics. Brexit means running the border between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom across the island as a sovereign ‘frontier’. Although this second matter is discussed mainly in terms of the implications for free movement of people and goods, we argue that it is freighted with meanings of identity. Brexit involves a ‘border in the mind’, those shifts in self-understanding, individually and collectively, attendant upon the referendum. This article examines this ‘border in the mind’ according to its effects on identity, politics and the constitution, and their implications for political stability in Northern Ireland.

scholarly journals Whose ‘wee country’?: identity politics and sport in Northern Ireland

Identities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Liston ◽  
Matthew Deighan
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics

Can Civil Society Succeed Where Elites Have Failed in the War on Sectarianism? Towards an Infinitely Demanding Politics for the North

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Doran
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Good Friday Agreement ◽  
New Community

Caught between the well-armed imaginations of paramilitary organisations competing for the hearts and minds of a divided population, and state engineering of a liberal peace, civil society's impact on Northern Ireland's identity politics was limited during the thirty-year conflict. Specifically, the community and voluntary sector itself has tended to replicate as much as it challenged patterns of segregation in many of its own structures. With plans set out in the Northern Ireland Executive's Programme for Government (2008–11) to engage civil society in opening a new era of ‘good relations’ work to counter sectarianism and racism, civil society organisations will face a complex terrain, facing scepticism about their contribution to peace-making before the Good Friday Agreement, and working in a post-Agreement environment marked by continuing elite and communal antagonism demonstrated by the crisis at the turn of 2009 over devolution of justice and policing powers to the Northern Ireland Executive. A significant aspect of the resolution was a belated agreement by Sinn Fein and the DUP on a new community relation strategy, Cohesion, Sharing and Integration. This article suggests that civil society has a significant role to play in encouraging communities to confront the contradictions and tensions that continue to haunt the political architects of the Good Friday Agreement by affirming a radical and contingent vision of democracy as democratisation at a distance from the identity-saturated politics of the state-region of Northern Ireland. It draws on the work of Simon Critchley, Emmanuel Levinas and Wendy Brown, to offer an approach to identity politics in post-conflict Northern Ireland, focusing on the future orientation of civil society.

The Irish Presbyterian Mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Evolutionary Science ◽  
Definition Of

This book considers how one protestant community responded to the challenges posed to traditional understandings of Christian faith between 1830 and 1930. It examines the attitudes of the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to biblical criticism, modern historical method, evolutionary science, and liberal forms of protestant theology. It explores how they reacted to developments in other Christian traditions, including the so-called ‘Romeward’ trend in the established Churches of England and Ireland and the ‘Romanization’ of Catholicism. Was their response distinctively Presbyterian and Irish? How was it shaped by Presbyterian values, intellectual first principles, international denominational networks, identity politics, the expansion of higher education, and relations with other Christian denominations? The story begins in the 1830s, when evangelicalism came to dominate mainstream Presbyterianism, the largest protestant denomination in present-day Northern Ireland. The story ends in the 1920s with the exoneration of J. E. Davey, a professor in the Presbyterian College, Belfast, who was tried for heresy on accusations of being a ‘modernist’. Within this time frame, the book describes the formation and maintenance of a religiously conservative intellectual community. At the heart of the interpretation is the interplay between the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith and a commitment to common evangelical principles and religious experience that drew protestants together from various denominations. The definition of conservative within the Presbyterian Church in Ireland moved between these two poles.

scholarly journals Linguistic Identites in Post-Conflict Societies

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-92
Author(s):  
Freya Stancombe-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Linguistic Barriers ◽  
Politics Of Language

This article assesses the identity politics of language in post-conflict Northern Ireland, where language debates at a political level have been encased in questions of identity. However, despite the continued existence of ethnocentric narratives around language, opportunities have emerged for individuals to cross linguistic barriers and challenge the perspective that certain languages ‘belong’ to certain communities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document