In Defence of Politics: Interpreting the Peace Process and the Future of Northern Ireland

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL DIXON
Author(s):  
Stephen Ryan

This article explores the reasons for the slow progress being made in the Northern Ireland peace process. It examines complications that exist in dealing with the past, present, and future of the conflict between the two main communities whilst also arguing that it is hard to separate these time frames in practice. In terms of the present, some well known difficulties with the consociational approach are identified. Recent studies have also demonstrated a failure to address sectarianism at the grass-roots level and there has been a resurgence in activity by spoilers and rejectionists. When thinking about the future the two communities still have competing views about the final constitutional destiny of Northern Ireland and this inhibits the development of a sense of a shared future. Although there have been a plethora of initiatives for dealing with the past and for truth recovery, there does not appear to have been a satisfactory approach to this important dimension of peacebuilding. The article concludes by advocating two key strategies. The first is the development of initiatives based on the pursuit of superordinate goals. The second endorses Rorty’s idea of sentimental education as a way of building greater solidarity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan José Cogolludo Díaz

Based on Philoctetes, the tragic play by Sophocles, the poet Seamus Heaney creates his own version in The Cure at Troy to present the political and social problems in Northern Ireland during the period that became known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. This paper aims to highlight the significance of Heaney’s play in the final years of the conflict. Heaney uses the classical Greek play to bring to light the plight and suffering of the Northern Irish people as a consequence of the atavistic and sectarian violence between the unionist and nationalist communities. Nevertheless, Heaney also provides possible answers that allow readers to harbour a certain degree of hope towards peace and the future in Northern Ireland.


2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-8
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Royle

Abstract The paper considers Belfast as an ‘island city’ with reference to issues of identity and economy and especially in connection with a series of statements from the ‘Futures of Islands’ briefing document prepared for the IGU’s Commission on Islands meeting in Kraków in August 2014. Belfast as a contested space, a hybrid British/Irish city on the island of Ireland, exemplifies well how ‘understandings of the past condition the future’, whilst the Belfast Agreement which brought the Northern Ireland peace process to its culmination after decades of violence known as the ‘Troubles’ speaks to ‘island ways of knowing, of comprehending problems - and their solutions’. Finally, Belfast certainly demonstrates that ‘island peoples shape their contested futures’


2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642098582
Author(s):  
Colin Coulter

For all the gains made during its celebrated peace process, Northern Ireland remains haunted by a conflict that claimed more than 3,700 lives. One of the spaces in which the ghosts of the past manifest themselves is that of television drama. In this article, Mark Fisher’s reading of “hauntology” provides the theoretical frame for an analysis of two recent TV series set in Northern Ireland: The Fall and Derry Girls. Although the programs could not be more different in both tone and content, they both illustrate sharply that the region remains, in John Hewitt’s indelible phrase, a “ghost-haunted land.” In particular, The Fall and Derry Girls reveal that Northern Ireland continues to be deeply troubled both by those who were lost during the conflict and by that which was lost in the transition to peace.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Brian Lambkin

Two previous articles proposed the reframing of metaphors for metaphor and time in terms of migration as a device or tool for promoting public understanding. They addressed the difficulty in the social world of explaining the world of metaphor and the world of time (Lambkin, 2012, 2014). The latter was concerned with a particular difficulty of time: explaining how we access the world of the past and the world of the future from the world of the present. The concern here is with a further difficulty of time: explaining how, once ‘accessed’, we ‘deal with’ the past and ‘deal with’ the future. It is argued that a better understanding of the simultaneity of these two inextricably linked actions is important in the social world, especially in the discourse of conflict resolution when the tension between ‘dealing with’ the past and ‘dealing with’ the future is an intractable problem, as currently in the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’. The metaphorical representation of that tension is examined in a recent document of the Northern Ireland peace process (Haas & O’Sullivan, 2013) and in three other illustrative texts (Hughes & Hamlin, 1977; Giddens, 1999; Cameron, 2011). A proposal is made for reframing the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous pluralism’ or ‘plural singularity’ in terms of migration, as a way of promoting the public understanding of time in particular, and as an aid to resolving or ‘dealing with’ the tension between ‘dealing with’ the past and ‘dealing with’ the future when in the social world it becomes problematic.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-171
Author(s):  
Michele K. Esposito

The Quarterly Update is a summary of bilateral, multilateral, regional, and international events affecting the Palestinians and the future of the peace process.


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