Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Publication
    Contemporary republicanism and the strategy of armed struggle
    (UCD Press, 2004)
    Assuming 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?
      183
  • Publication
    Beyond Inequality? assessing the impact of fair employment, affirmative action and equality measures on conflict in Northern Ireland
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012-10) ;
    Northern Ireland is an excellent test case of the impact of fair employment, affirmative action and equality measures on ethno-communal conflict. Given the complex interconnection of factors at play in conflict, the conclusion is not a simple one although the facts are clear. From deep and historically entrenched inequality on a multiplicity of dimensions, a disadvantaged Catholic population only very slowly – and with the help of a range of allies in the US, and emerging international equality norms – got increasingly strong equality measures enacted, and very unevenly moved closer to a position of equality and indeed power. This population had traditionally mobilised on a nationalist rather than an egalitarian platform. In 1968-9, however, a civil rights campaign (in which discrimination in public employment and housing, and a consciousness of social injustice more generally, formed an important part) triggered thirty years of violent conflict which quickly became framed in nationalist terms. In the 1980s, for reasons which we discuss below, issues of economic inequality came high onto the political agenda. Since 1998, there has been a political settlement on the basis of a substantive improvement in the condition of Catholics there on all measures – economic, political and cultural - while leaving the national question open for the future. Equality is neither perfectly assured nor stable, and national identities and oppositions remain salient, yet there is a discernible identity shift and change in the urgency of nationalist aims, which appear to be related to the equality measures. The intellectual challenge is to pull apart the various strands of causality, to see how equality (for the purposes of this paper, economic equality and in particular, affirmative action measures) contributed to this. This paper gives a broad overview of the relation between changing processes of collective mobilisation, changing policies and changing benchmarks of communal in/equality in the context of a radically changing economic structure. It argues that the politicisation of economic inequality was a phase in a longer process of communal struggle, one which lost intensity only when some of the most striking aspects of employment inequality were remedied, but well before complete equality was achieved: while wider forms of in/equality have become politicised, the achievement of substantive economic progress towards equality has changed the frame of struggle, significantly moderating nationalist politics and shifting unionist self-conceptions although not blurring communal boundaries.
      308
  • Publication
    Theorising the transition: Longue durée and current conjuncture in centre-periphery relations in Britain, France and Spain
    (UCD Press, 2003-11-28)
    Contemporary 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.
      107
  • Publication
    Ireland's Ethno-Religious Conflicts: Path Dependence and its Legacies
    (Irish Geography Publications, 2012-12)
    This 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.
      181
  • Publication
      254
  • Publication
    Multiple temporalities in violent conflicts: Northern Ireland, the Basque Country and Macedonia
    (ECPR Press, 2015-10) ;
    Political 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.
      761
  • Publication
    A politics of transition in Britain, France and Spain
    (University College Dublin Press, 2003-09-29) ; ;
    The 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.
      450
  • Publication
    Ireland's multiple interface-periphery development model: Achievements and limits
    (Aarhus University Press, 2010)
    Globalisation 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?
      411