Northern Ireland And The Politics Of Reconciliation

This collection adds to the extensive literature on Northern Ireland and Ireland by bringing together the leading academic and political figures working in the field and offering a comprehensive, multidisciplinary overview of the historical process. The topics discussed include the remote and proximate causes of the conflict, fresh developments within the two states on the island, the role of the Roman Catholic Church, the rise of the ecumenical movement and the impact of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement on the triangular relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London. The volume concludes with an evaluation of likely impact of membership of the European Community on the conflict in Northern Ireland. The contributors to this book do not offer any easy solutions but provide a context in which the problem may be better understood by the international scholarly community and by the interested general reader.

As Northern Ireland comes to terms with the nitty-gritty of the peace process, commentator Norman Porter suggests a moral pathway towards a new and enlightened society in this text.

Hume recounts the struggle for the nationalist community's rights and presents a blueprint for peace.

"More than twenty years after the peace agreement signed in Belfast on 10 April 1998, an assessment is overdue, particularly given the current political context in Northern Ireland. A serious political crisis led to the suspension of the regional institutions from January 2017 to January 2020, and the Brexit negotiations did not facilitate the search for a solution, especially as the confidence-and-supply agreement between the British Conservative Party and the DUP prevented London from acting as an honest broker between Sinn Féin and the DUP. At the same time, the issue of the Irish border created tensions between Dublin and London. This situation has been compounded by the resurgence of rioting, mostly in Loyalist areas of Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, in April 2021, against the backdrop of Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol and communal resentment. Emanating from a conference jointly organised at the University of Caen Normandy and the University of La Rochelle, this collection of essays - bringing together academic and independent scholars from various disciplines and nationalities - takes a critical look at the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, from the collaboration between Dublin and London to the new political configurations in Northern Ireland, as well as interfaith, cultural, social and economic developments. Divided into three main parts, it furnishes an opportunity to better understand the reasons for the apparent deterioration in inter-community understanding since 1998, but also to study the numerous initiatives that have sought to promote reconciliation, be it in the economy, the working environment, in the literary and artistic spheres, in schools or in the urban landscape"--

The social and political strife in Northern Ireland is one of the longest-lived conflicts in the modern world. Yet the full story of Northern Ireland, including the peace process finally begun with the 1998 Good Friday agreement, is more expansive than the political sphere. This timely work tells the important stories of Christians who helped create the context in which the politicians were able to build a framework for reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

Drawing on over 150 interviews with former IRA, INLA, UVF, and UFF prisoners, this is a major analysis of why Northern Ireland has seen a transition from war to peace. Most accounts of the peace process are "top-down," relying upon the views of political elites. This book is "bottom-up," analyzing the voices of those who actually "fought the war." What made them fight, why did they stop and what are the lessons for other conflict zones? Using unrivalled access to members of the armed groups, the book, available for the first time in paperback, offers a critical appraisal of one-dimensional accounts of the onset of peace, grounded in "mutually hurting stalemate" and "ripeness," which downgrade the political and economic aspects of conflict. Military stalemate had been evident since the early 1970s and offers little in explaining the timing of the peace process. Moreover, Republicans and Loyalists based their ceasefires upon very different perceptions of transformation or victory. Based on a Leverhulme Trust project and written by an expert team, Abandoning Historical Conflict? offers a new analysis, based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic, and personal changes and experiences.

How did civil society function as a locus for reconciliation initiatives since the beginning of the 20th century? The essays in this volume challenge the conventional understanding of reconciliation as a benign state-driven process. They explore how a range of civil society actors - from Turkish intellectuals apologizing for the Armenian Genocide to religious organizations working towards the improvement of Franco-German relations - have confronted and coped with the past. These studies offer a critical perspective on local and transnational reconciliation acts by questioning the extent to which speech became an alternative to silence, remembrance to forgetting, engagement to oblivion.