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Ruane, Joseph
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Ruane, Joseph
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Ruane, Joseph
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- PublicationContemporary republicanism and the strategy of armed struggleAssuming that the conflict of the past thirty years is now drawing to a close, we can, with a certain distance and detachment, attempt to map its parameters, examine its causes and consequences, and seek to learn from it. Why did the conflict initially break out, why did it last so long, and why did it end when it did? Has the Good Friday Agreement finally legitimated Northern Ireland as a political entity, and has violence now been de-legitimated as a weapon in Irish and in Irish-British politics? Is political violence likely to continue in some form and could it conceivably return on the scale of the past thirty years?
184 - PublicationIreland's multiple interface-periphery development model: Achievements and limitsGlobalisation is a challenge that creates both winners and losers. Until 2008 the small Northern European states were amongst the winners as they adjust well to rapid changes in the international political economy. These countries traditionally stay competitive by balancing open economies and flexible industrial policies within various forms of social partnerships and welfare systems. But what are the factors of their success, what is the significance of the state in a globalised economy, how do we explain the differentiated effects - and what has happened after the recent economic decline?
413 - PublicationMultiple temporalities in violent conflicts: Northern Ireland, the Basque Country and MacedoniaPolitical violence must be placed in its temporal context if we are to understand its causes, course, and the dangers that remain when it ends. Doing so reveals causal processes that are missed in wider and flatter generalisations – the social relations and structural processes of long provenance that increase the propensity to violence and determine the success or failure of settlement initiatives. Long-term structures can be changed, and small changes in them may make a big difference in outcome. The actors most able to change them are powerful states and international actors. This is a difficult and costly task and they may be tempted to stop when political agreement is reached. We have argued that much more is needed.
765 - PublicationIreland's Ethno-Religious Conflicts: Path Dependence and its LegaciesThis paper asks why Catholic-Protestant conflict has been so long- lasting in Ireland, and to what extent the Good Friday Agreement deals with the remaining conditions of conflict. It proposes an explanation for the persistence of conflict over the long term and in the two parts of Ireland since partition. It is offered as a tribute in a different disciplinary register to Professor W J Smyth, whose historical geography of the Irish longue durée has fascinated and challenged me for more than three decades. More personally, it is an expression of thanks for an equal number of years of collegiality and friendship.
183 - PublicationTheorising the transition: Longue durée and current conjuncture in centre-periphery relations in Britain, France and SpainContemporary social theorists argue that we are at a moment of profound cultural and historical transition. This is conceived variously as a shift from modernity to reflexive modernity, from modernity to post- modernity, from the Westphalian system of nation-states to a global order, from the ‘Modern Age’ to the ‘Global Age’. The substantive arguments include the claim that the nation-state is in crisis as power is devolved upwards to international bodies and downwards to regions, that borders are dissolving and ‘societies’ are turning into multiple, spatially-extensive, open-ended networks, that social structures are ‘liquifying’ and cultures fragmenting. Is contemporary change really so far-reaching? Not everyone is so convinced.
109 - PublicationThe roots of intense ethnic conflict may not in fact be ethnic: Categories, communities and path dependenceThis article criticizes two theoretical approaches to ethnicity and ethnic conflict. One emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic bond and explains this in terms of a deep, quasi-kin feeling. The other emphasizes the contingency and situatedness of ethnic feeling and the fluctuating character of ethnic groupness. We adopt an alternative strategy, locating ethnicity as one factor among many, which may form a path-dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict..
470Scopus© Citations 65 - PublicationThe roots of intense ethnic conflict may not in fact be ethnic : categories, communities and path dependence(University College Dublin. Institute for the Study of Social Change (Geary Institute), 2003)
; This article criticizes two theoretical strategies of approach to ethnicity and ethnic conflict and proposes an alternative. One strategy emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic or ethno-national bond and the resistance to change of the communities thus formed; it explains these phenomena in terms of the deep feeling surrounding the quasi-kin sense of ethnicity. The other strategy emphasizes the contingency, situatedness, variability, even superficiality of ethnic feeling, and shows how the emergent and unstable linkages which constitute ethnic ‘groups’ are formed from an interplay of ethnic categories and ethnic entrepreneurs within a given institutional and legal context. We adopt an alternative theoretical strategy, seeing ethnicity as a product of a multiplicity of determinants rather than a simple essence, and locating it as one factor among many, which, depending on the tightness or looseness of their interlinkages and mutual feedback mechanisms, may form a path dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict.1704 - PublicationA politics of transition in Britain, France and SpainThe decade of the 1990s saw the beginning of a new phase of globalisation and continuing European integration, the collapse of socialism and the triumph of neo-liberalism, the mainstreaming of cultural postmodernism and the intensification of identity politics. It was a period of transition in political institutions, demands and expectations. The political discourse associated with these changes was radical: this was a global age, hybrid, regionalist, postnationalist, and above all 'new'. But just how radical were the political changes, and did they signal a new convergence across European states? This book is a study of the changing forms of the state, and in particular of changing centre- periphery relations, in Britain, France and Spain. It analyses the character and extent of the changes and their causes and consequences, not just territorially but also institutionally in the area of policing. It identifies the degree of convergence in the three states.
451 - PublicationPath-dependence in settlement processes : explaining settlement in Northern IrelandThe recent literature on path dependence provides a model that can be used in explanation of ethnic conflict and settlement processes. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article identifies path dependent patterns of conflict embedded in long-term processes of political development whose change may interrupt these patterns. It highlights the importance of long-term state trajectories in constituting and reproducing these patterns, the generation of ‘endogenous’ processes of change and the impact of wider geopolitical processes in strengthening these. It shows how and why factors such as power, perception, networks and institutions vary in their impact on conflict and explains when they work together to produce settlement.
1607Scopus© Citations 53