Shared Society Or Benign Apartheid

This book analyses the role power sharing, social movements, economic regeneration, urban space, memorialisation and symbols play in transforming divided societies into shared peaceful ones. It explains why some projects are counterproductive while others assist peace-building.

This book explores the nexus between education and politics in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Macedonia, drawing from an extensive body of original evidence and literature on power-sharing and post-conflict education in these post-conflict societies, as well as the repercussions that emerged from the end of civil war. This book demonstrates that education policy affects the resilience of political settlements by helping reproduce and reinforce the mutually exclusive religious, ethnic, and national communities that participated in conflict and now share political power. Using curricula for subjects—such as history, citizenship education, and languages—and structures like the existence of state-funded separate or common schools, Fontana shows that power-sharing constrains the scope for specific education reforms and offers some suggestions for effective ones to aid political stability and reconciliation after civil wars.

This book offers a comparative lens on the contested relationship between two leading conflict resolution norms: ethnopolitical power-sharing pacts and the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. Championed by national governments and international organizations over the last two decades, power-sharing and feminist scholars and practitioners tend to view them as opposing norms. Critics charge that power-sharing scholars cast gender as an inconsequential political identity that does not motivate people like ethnonationalism. From a feminist perspective, such thinking serves the interests of ethnicized elites while excluding women and other marginalized communities from key sites of political power. This edited volume takes a different tack: while recognizing the gender gaps that still exist in power-sharing theory and practice, contributors also emphasize the constructive engagements that can be built between ethnopolitical power-sharing and gender inclusion. Three main themes are highlighted: The ‘gender silences’ of existing power-sharing arrangements The impact of gender activism and advocacy on the negotiation and implementation of power-sharing pacts in divided societies The opportunities for linkages between power-sharing and the women, peace and security agenda. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

Violently divided societies present major challenges to institutions seeking to establish peace in places characterised by ethnic conflict and high levels of social segregation. Yet such societies also contain groups that refuse to be confined within separate forms of ethnic community and instead develop alternative modes of action that generate shared identities, build trust and foster consensual, peaceful politics. Advancing a unique social movement approach to the study of violently divided societies, this book highlights how various social movements function within a context of violent ethnic politics and provide new ways of imagining citizenship that complements peacebuilding. By analysing the impact of social movements on divided societies, this book contributes to debates about the complexity of belonging and identity, and constructs a nuanced understanding of political mobilisation in regions defined by ethnic violence. In turn, the book provides important insights into the dynamics of social movement mobilisation. Based on the author's extensive research in Lebanon and Northern Ireland, and drawing on numerous examples from other divided societies, this book examines a range of social movements, including nationalists, victims, sexual minorities, labour movements, feminists, environmentalists, secularists, and peace movements. Bringing together social theory and case studies in order to consider how grassroots movements intersect with political institutions, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policymakers working in sociology and politics.

The establishment of durable, democratic institutions constitutes one of the major challenges of our age. As countless contemporary examples have shown, it requires far more than simply the holding of free elections. The consolidation of a legitimate constitutional order is difficult to achieve in any society, but it is especially problematic in societies with deep social cleavages. This book provides an authoritative and systematic analysis of the politics of so-called 'deeply divided societies' in the post Cold War era. From Bosnia to South Africa, Northern Ireland to Iraq, it explains why such places are so prone to political violence, and demonstrates why - even in times of peace - the fear of violence continues to shape attitudes, entrenching divisions in societies that already lack consensus on their political institutions. Combining intellectual rigour and accessibility, it examines the challenge of establishing order and justice in such unstable environments, and critically assesses a range of political options available, from partition to power-sharing and various initiatives to promote integration. The Politics of Deeply Divided Societies is an ideal resource for students of comparative politics and related disciplines, as well as anyone with an interest in the dynamics of ethnic conflict and nationalism.

This title proposes a theory of international insult that focuses on interrelations between social identity and power. The book analyses conflicts between the US and North Korea, sovereignty contestations around islands in the Japanese sea, Pussy Riot in Russia, veterans in Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Irish Ethnologies gives an overview of the field of Irish ethnology, covering representative topics of institutional history and methodology, as well as case studies dealing with religion, ethnicity, memory, development, folk music, and traditional cosmology. This collection of essays draws from work in multiple disciplines including but not limited to anthropology and ethnomusicology. These essays, first published in French in the journal Ethnologie française, illuminate the complex history of Ireland and exhibit the maturity of Irish anthropology. Martine Segalen contends that these essays are part of a larger movement that “galvanized the quiet revolution in the domain of the ethnology of France.” They did so by making specific examples, in this instance Ireland, inform a larger definition of a European identity. The essays, edited by Ó Giolláin, also significantly explain, expand, and challenge “Irish ethnography.” From twelfth-century accounts to Anglo-Irish Romanticism, from topographical surveys to statistical accounts, the statistical and literary descriptions of Ireland and the Irish have prefigured the ethnography of Ireland. This collection of articles on the ethnographic disciplines in Ireland provides an instructive example of how a local anthropology can have lessons for the wider field. This book will interest academics and students of anthropology, folklore studies, history, and Irish Studies, as well as general readers. Contributors: Martine Segalen, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Hastings Donnan, Anne Byrne, Pauline Garvey, Adam Drazin, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, Joseph Ruane, Ethel Crowley, Dominic Bryan, Helena Wulff, Guy Beiner, Sylvie Muller, and Anthony McCann.

Focusing on Mostar, a city in Bosnia Herzegovina that became the epitome of ethnic divisions during the Yugoslav wars, this cutting edge book considers processes of violent partitioning in cities. Providing an in-depth understanding of the social, political, and mundane dynamics that keep cities polarized, it examines the potential that moments of inter-ethnic collaboration hold in re-imaging these cities as other than divided. Against the backdrop of normalised practices of ethnic partitioning, the book studies both ‘planned’ and ‘unplanned’ moments of disruption; it looks at how networks of solidarity come into existence regardless of identity politics as well as the role of organised grassroots groups that attempt to create more inclusive; and it critically engages with urban spaces of resistance. Challenging the representation of the city as merely a site of ethnic divisions, the author also explores the complexities arising from living in a city that validates its citizens solely through ethnicity. Elaborating on the relationships between space, culture and social change, this book is a key read for scholars, students, and urban practitioners studying ethnically divided cities worldwide.