Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    The 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.
      1697
  • Publication
    Explaining settlement in Northern Ireland : power, perception and path dependence
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2006-01-11) ;
    This paper criticizes four typical explanations of settlement of internal conflicts, showing that they fail to give an adequate explanation of the 1998 settlement in Northern Ireland. Instead of inductively searching for recurrent proximate factors or proceeding deductively by applying general theoretical models to settlement processes, it suggests that it may be more fruitful to search for underlying path dependent processes which regulate how the factors highlighted in the other approaches function.
      208
  • Publication
    Protestant minorities in European states and nations
    (University College Dublin. Institute for British-Irish Studies, 2009) ;
    Europe’s traditional ethnic minorities and the conflicts over their place in the state and nation are the focus of continuing comparative research. In contrast, little attention is paid to Europe’s older religious conflicts, in particular those that stem from the reformation. Yet for long religiously informed conflict was the principal source of internal state division and the major perceived threat to state stability and security. This paper looks at the institutional changes and cultural renegotiations which allowed traditional religious oppositions, rivalries and conflicts to fade in most contemporary European societies. It concludes that neither modernisation, democratisation nor secularisation were enough to resolve deep-set tensions. The long-term resolutions involved a restructuring of polity and nation in a way consistent with minority, as well as majority culture. In the past – as perhaps also in the present - such opportunities were rare and demanded choice, strategy and political fortune.
      434