Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Publication
    The roots of intense ethnic conflict may not in fact be ethnic: Categories, communities and path dependence
    (Cambridge University Press, 2004-04) ;
    This 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..
      468Scopus© Citations 65
  • Publication
    Path-dependence in settlement processes : explaining settlement in Northern Ireland
    (Political Studies Association and Blackwell Publishing, 2007-06) ;
    The 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.
    Scopus© Citations 53  1602
  • 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