Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Publication
    Does being Protestant matter? Protestants, minorities and the re-making of ethno-religious identity after the Good Friday Agreement
    The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This paper looks at the how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests which, at least in this case, are as important to identification as are social solidarities.
      724Scopus© Citations 16
  • Publication
    Fluid or frozen? Choice and change in ethno-national identification in contemporary Northern Ireland
    This article works with in-depth interviews from research projects in Northern Ireland to show different processes of choice and change in national identity. It argues that situational variation in identity is quite compatible with unchanging and oppositional forms of identity. Significant identity change is possible but uncommon, it requires incentives and resources, and it is more likely to occur in conflict generating than in conflict resolving directions
    Scopus© Citations 32  1361
  • Publication
    Does being protestant matter? Protestants, minorities and the re-making of religious identity after the Good Friday Agreement
    (University College Dublin. Institute for British-Irish Studies, 2009) ; ; ;
    The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This paper looks at the how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests which, at least in this case, are as important to identification as are social solidarities.
      235
  • Publication
    The moral boundaries of the nation : nation, state and boundaries in the Southern Irish border counties
    This article argues that nationalism is more varied in the way that it constructs its boundaries than contemporary scholarship suggests. In an interdisciplinary, multistranded qualitative study of ethno-national identity on the Southern side of the Irish border, it shows the moral repertoires that qualify, conflict with, and on occasion replace, territorial-ethnic and state-centred aspects of national identity. It refocuses attention on the cultural and normative content of imagined national communities, and the different ways in which general norms function in particular communal contexts. It casts a new light on Southern attitudes to Irish unity. More generally, it suggests that a form of moral nationalism is possible, distinct from the forms more typically discussed in the literature: ethnic, civic, trans nationalism or even banal nationalism.
      464
  • Publication
    Borders, states and nations. Contested boundaries and national identities in the Irish border area
    Much scholarly writing on states and state boundaries assumes that these form or at least condition the bounds of identity. The 'institutionalisation' process is said to be one where the boundaries of the state become the boundaries of everyday life and imagined community. In an interdisciplinary, multi-stranded qualitative research on the Irish border, no such process of institutionalization was found. Rather the state border was perceived as a fluctuating area of danger and economic opportunity. To the extent that it was perceived to impact at all on identity, it was on the moral and cultural content of identity rather than its national form, on the mode in which national and ethno-religious categories were lived rather than on those categories themselves.
      512