Unionists Loyalists And Conflict Transformation In Northern Ireland

Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.

The End of Ulster Loyalism? explores the dynamics and divisions within paramilitary groups since the mid-1970s. It, despite contrary public opinion, details and explains the nature of Loyalist conflict transformation. A key model of transition that is relevant to arenas beyond Northern Ireland. The book also discusses the nature and extent of loyalist violence and provides a rarely heard voice regarding State-led collusion. It locates Loyalist ideas and opinions that have been largely invisible and highlights how an extensive element of positive Loyalist renewal has been purposefully suppressed and unmentioned. It is a key text for any student of politics, criminology, human geography, and conflict and conflict transformation and is particularly relevant to the scholarship of pro-State groups who are infrequently considered in academic deliberations. A book of both hope and despair that emerges from a destabilizing past and a yet to be decided future.

In Northern Ireland, a once seemingly intractable conflict is in a state of transformation. Lee A. Smithey offers a grassroots view of that transformation, drawing on interviews, documentary evidence, and extensive field research. He offers essential models for how ethnic and communal-based conflicts can shift from violent confrontation toward peaceful co-existence. Smithey focuses particularly on Protestant unionists and loyalists in Northern Ireland, who maintain varying degrees of commitment to the Protestant faith, the Crown, and and Ulster / British identity. He argues that antagonistic collective identities in ethnopolitical conflict can become less polarizing as partisans adopt new conflict strategies and means of expressing identity. Consequently, the close relationship between collective identity and collective action is a crucial element of conflict transformation. Smithey closely examines attempts in Protestant/unionist/loyalist communities and organizations to develop more constructive means of expressing collective identity and pursuing political agendas that can help improve community relations. Key leaders and activists have begun to reframe shared narratives and identities, making possible community support for negotiations, demilitarization, and political cooperation, while also diminishing out-group polarization. As Smithey shows, this kind of shift in strategy and collective vision is the heart of conflict transformation, and the challenges and opportunities faced by grassroots unionists and loyalists in Northern Ireland can prove instructive for other regions of intractable conflict.

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 offering 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 Histroical Conflict? offers a new analysis, based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic and personal changes and experiences. Combined, these allowed combatants to move from violence to peace whilst retaining core ideological beliefs and maintaining long-term constitutional visions. Former prisoners now act as ambassadors for peace in Northern Ireland. Knowledge of why and how combatants switched to peaceful methodologies amid widespread skepticism over prospects for peace is essential to our understanding of the management of global peace processes. Abandoning Histroical Conflict? is essential reading for policy-makers, academics, students and anyone with an interest in how war can become peace.

Inequality, Identity, and the Politics of Northern Ireland examines how the politics of threat and resentment, undergirded by persistent poverty and class and gender inequalities across Catholic and Protestant communities, shape dynamics of political conflict, while simultaneously giving way to critical subjectivities at the community level through which more transformative visions of “peace” may emerge.

This book considers the politics of the Protestant Unionist Loyalist population in Northern Ireland during and following the peace process, and the political positioning of the main organizations representing them as they inch towards a post-conflict society. One central question remains: how, if at all, unionism has changed following the political accord and the establishment of devolved government. McAuley sets out in detail how senses of identity and political processes are understood within unionism and how unionists and loyalists interpret these as a basis for social and political action. This forms the basis for an investigation of the extent to which the political settlement has been grounded within unionism, and how in turn unionist hegemony has reconstructed around the interpretative frame of the DUP. Drawing on collective memories in a particular way has enabled the DUP to convince broad strands of unionism that they have been able to best identify and resist major threats to the Union, arguing that it was their strategy which finally brought Irish republicanism to account. That reasoning justified their entry into a coalition government with Sinn Fein. This in turn has again brought to the fore the cry of 'sell-out' from other unionists, this time aimed directly at the DUP leadership.

The aim of this book is to analyse whether the implementation of the peacebuilding elements of the Belfast Agreement contributed to the transformation of the protracted Northern Ireland Conflict. Therefore, this book deals with the following sections of the Agreement: Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity, Decommissioning, Security, Policing and Justice, and Prisoners. The author comes to the conclusion that the majority of the peacebuilding elements contributed to the transformation of the Northern Ireland Conflict. The results of the study were obtained in conducting interviews, in consulting surveys, and in studying reports and other relevant literature on the recent developments in Northern Ireland.

Consociational power sharing is often perceived to be the method of conflict management that is most likely to succeed in deeply divided societies. The case of Northern Ireland in particular is heralded by many as a consociational success story. Since the signing of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in 1998, significant conflict transformation has taken place in the form of a considerable reduction in levels of violence and the establishment of power sharing between unionists and nationalists. This book looks at what consociational power sharing achieves after its implementation – specifically, whether it can work to overcome existing identities in divided societies, or whether it simply freezes divisions. It argues that if consociational power sharing is facilitating a move towards a genuinely shared society, this would be demonstrated in the focus of the election campaigns of Northern Ireland’s political parties, which would be almost exclusively based around socio-economic issues affecting the whole population, rather than narrow single identity concerns. However, the book claims that, on the whole, this has not been realised. Although election campaigns are today less strident than they were in the pre-1998 era, it remains the case that they usually foreground single identity symbolism, as it is this that resonates with voters. Whilst consociational power sharing has been very successful in reducing levels of violent conflict and facilitating elite level cooperation between unionists and nationalists, it has been much less successful in reducing divisions within wider society to facilitate a genuinely shared Northern Irish identity. By establishing an important middle ground between consociational proponents and critics, this research will be of significant interest to students and scholars of ethnic politics, political sociology, conflict management, and divided societies more generally.