Loyalty and human rights: liminality and social action in a divided society

Abstract

With the signing of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement in 1998, human rights moved to the centre of political, legal and social activism and policy development. This contribution draws on sociological understandings of agency and social action in order to examine the role of loyalty in shaping the way community activists understand, negotiate and incorporate the language, principles and practices of human rights into their lives and activities. The research was undertaken in Belfast between 2005 and 2009. As an explicitly theorised category of experience, loyalty has often been neglected in empirical sociological work, in understanding ethno-nationalist conflict and in research on human rights. This contribution seeks to fill this significant gap in theoretical and empirical understanding.

Keywords:

• ethno-nationalist conflict
• loyalty
• social action
• human rights
• liminality

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Yasemin Soysal for her support and guidance throughout my PhD and also co-editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this contribution. Any errors are of course entirely my own.

Notes

Rob Stone, ‘Theories of Social Action’, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. B.S. Turner (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 84.

Noberto Bobbio, The Age of Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

Lydia Morris, ‘A Foundation for Rights or Theories of Practice?’, in Rights: Sociological Perspectives, ed. Lydia Morris (London: Routledge, 2006), 244.

This phrase is drawn from an article of the same name by Maggie Beirne, ‘Social and Economic Rights as Agents for Change’, in Human Rights in the Community: Rights as Agents for Change, ed. Colin Harvey (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2005), 43–62.

Its official title is the Multi-Party Agreement 1998. See Northern Ireland Office (1998) The Agreement: Agreement Reached in the Multiparty Negotiations (Northern Ireland Office: Northern Ireland Office Publications), http://www.nio.gov.uk/agreement.pdf (accessed 16 October 2010).

The Northern Ireland conflict has generated a vast literature. The Cain Conflict Archive on the internet housed at the University of Ulster provides excellent source material. See http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ (accessed 1 September 2010).

The phrase ‘two communities’ refers to the principle Catholic/Nationalist/Republican and Protestant/Loyalist/Unionist communities of Northern Ireland that the Good Friday Agreement was designed to address.

Bryan S. Turner, ‘A Sociology of Citizenship and Human Rights: Does Social Theory Exist?’, in Interpreting Human Rights: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Rhiannon Morgan and Bryan S. Turner (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 181.

The definition I draw on here was developed by Neil Jarman, as ‘the intersection of segregated and polarised working class residential zones in areas between territory and ethno-political identity’. Neil Jarman, Demography, Development and Disorder: Changing Patterns of Interface Areas (Belfast: The Institute for Conflict Research, 2004). The focus on ‘working class’ recognises that tensions can be exacerbated by class and that more recently in some areas of Northern Ireland segregation is easing, whilst in other areas, particularly working class areas of Belfast, segregation continues, albeit differing in intensity at different times of the year (Jennifer Hamilton, Ulf Hansson, John Bell and Sarah Toucas, Segregated Lives, Social Division, Sectarianism and Everyday Life in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute for Conflict Research 2008).

I use the word ‘loyalty’ here in the sociological sense that will be developed further in this paper and not to refer to Protestant groups who are often referred to as Loyalist or as professing the political ideology of Loyalism. This will be expanded upon in the third section of this contribution.

There is wide agreement that the Northern Ireland conflict can best be conceptualised as ethno-nationalist. See for example John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Stefan Woolf, Disputed Territories: The Transnational Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict Settlement (New York: Bergan Books, 2003); B.C. Hayes and I. McAllister, ‘Ethnonationalism, Public Opinion and the Good Friday Agreement’, in After the Good Friday Agreement, Analysing Political Change in Northern Ireland, ed. Jennifer Ruane and Joseph Todd (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999), 30–48.

Michele Lamb, ‘Loyalty and Solidarity: Human Rights and Social Change in a Divided Society’ (PhD diss., University of Essex, 2009).

Robert R. Yin, Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 44.

Max Weber, Economy and Society Volumes 1 and 2 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978).

Ian Craib, Modern Social Theory from Parsons to Habermas, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Prentice Hall, 1992), 108.

William J. Sewell, ‘Culture, Structure, Agency and Transformation’, in The New American Cultural Sociology, ed. Phillip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193.

Morris, ‘A Foundation for Rights or Theories of Practice?’, 244–5.

Damien Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives on Human Rights’, in Human Rights, Politics and Practice, ed. Mark Goodhart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 102.

The concept of ‘strategies of action’ to which I will return throughout this paper has been developed by the American cultural sociologist Ann Swidler in a number of publications. See Ann Swidler, Talk of Love, How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ann Swidler, ‘Culture and Social Action’, in The New American Sociology, ed. P. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Ann Swidler, ‘Cultural Power and Social Movements’, in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnson and Bert Klandermans (London: Routledge, 1995), 25–40.

The contemporary conflict, known as ‘The Troubles’ began in the late 1960s and its impact continues to the present.

Marie Smyth and Jennifer Hamilton, ‘The Human Cost of the Troubles’, in Researching the Troubles: Social Science Perspectives on the Northern Ireland Conflict, ed. Owen Hargie and David Dickson (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing, 2003), 15–36.

Peter Shirlow and Brendan Murtagh, Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City, Contemporary Irish Studies, ed. Peter Shirlow (London: Pluto Press, 2006).

Micheal Connolly, Politics and Policy-Making in Northern Ireland (Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1990).

Karen Cerulo, ‘Individualism…Pro Tem: Reconsidering U.S. Social Relations’, in Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition, ed. Karen A. Cerulo (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279.

Beirne, ‘Social and Economic Rights as Agents for Change’.

Swidler, Talk of Love, 169–170 (note 19).

See for example Paul Mageen and Martin O'Brien, ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream: Human Rights and the Good Friday Agreement’, Fordham International Journal of Law 22 (1999): 1499.

Culture is used in Northern Ireland as a political tool that has fuelled conflict. See Camille O'Reilly, ‘The Politics of Culture in Northern Ireland’, in Peace at Last? The Impact of the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland, Studies in Ethnopolitics, ed. Jorg Neuheiser and Stefan Wolf (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 167–86.

The concept is used throughout the work of Ann Swidler and most fully developed in Talk of Love (note 19).

Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives on Human Rights’.

It is argued that this allowed civil society groups greater influence in how the Agreement would be enacted post-1998, see Christine Bell, Peace Agreements and Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

In 2001 a coalition of human rights advocacy groups came together to discuss how international and domestic ‘tools of rights’ could be used to challenge marginalisation and mainstream a rights-based approach to addressing the problems of inequality and deprivation on the Island of Ireland. The result was the formation of the Participation and Practice of Rights Project (PPR), see http://www.pprproject.org (accessed 1 September 2010) for further information. Also in Bierne, ‘Social and Economic Rights as Agents for Change’, 57. In addition, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland (CFNI) provided grants for local communities to fund local debates about the proposed Bill of Rights during the consultation that took place in 2008.

Bierne, ‘Social and Economic Rights as Agents for Change’, 47–8.

Dominic Bryan and Gillian McIntosh, ‘Symbols and Identity in the “New” Northern Ireland’, in Devolution and Constitutional Change in Northern Ireland, ed. Paul Carmichael, Colin Knox and R. Osborn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 125–37.

As at 1 July 2009, the Northern Ireland Office maintained 53 peace walls and in a survey for the Community Relations Council conducted by the Institute for Conflict Research, there are 88 peace walls in Northern Ireland overall, BBC News, ‘Forty Years of Peace Lines’, 1 July 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8121362.stm (accessed May 28, 2010).

‘Political Apathy Grows in Northern Ireland’, in Britain in 2010, Annual Magazine of the Economic and Social Research Council, p. 50.

William H. Sewell, Jnr, ‘Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille’, Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996), 841–81.

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 6th ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 209.

Patrick Grant, Literature, Rhetoric and Violence in Northern Ireland, 1968–98 Hardened to Death (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 92.

George P. Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Andrew Oldenquist, ‘Loyalty’, Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 4 (1982), 173–93; Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) (1995).

For example Emile Durkheim's research on social solidarity and anomie (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) and Max Weber's concern with status groups (Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, published in Germany in the early 1920s).

See for example, Robert D. Putman, ‘The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life’, The American Prospect 4, no. 13 (1993); Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) and more recently ‘E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century, the 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture’, Nordic Political Science Association 30, no. 2 (2007), 137–74.

James Conner, The Sociology of Loyalty (Springer, 2007).

Michael Waller and Andrew Linklater, eds, Political Loyalty and the Nation-State, Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 9.

Lamb, ‘Loyalty and Solidarity’.

Waller and Linklater, Political Loyalty and the Nation-State.

Patrick Thornberry, ‘Human Rights and the Shaping of Loyalties’, in Political Loyalty and the Nation-State, ed. Michael Waller and Andrew Linklater (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 92.

Conner, The Sociology of Loyalty, 51–60.

Ibid., 80.

Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships, 33.

Thomas M. Franck, ‘Clan and Superclan: Loyalty, Identity and Community in Law and Practice’, American Journal of International Law 90 (1996), 359–83; 361.

Lack of recognition of both Loyalism and Nationalism in Northern Ireland by their respective political patrons has led to both revising their political ideologies. See John Barry, ‘National Identities, Historical Narratives and Patron States in Northern Ireland', in Political Loyalty and the Nation-State, ed. Michael Waller and Andrew Linklater (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 195.

Conner, The Sociology of Loyalty, 130.

R.E. Erwin, ‘Loyalty and the Virtues’, The Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 169 (1992): 403–19.

Jon Elster, ‘Emotions’, in The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, ed. Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Whitney Pope, ‘Emile Durkheim’, in Key Sociological Thinkers, ed. Rob Stones (Palgrave, 1998), 54.

Conner, The Sociology of Loyalty, 53.

Ibid., 49–50.

Erwin, ‘Loyalty and the Virtues’.

Ibid., 411.

Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Response to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 98.

Michael Waller (note 46), 7.

Conner, The Sociology of Loyalty, 47–8.

Ibid., 131–2.

Ibid., 131.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

Arlene Foster, ‘Protestants Need Rights Explained to Them’, Fortnight Magazine, no. 411 (2003), 12–3.

Brian Dooley, Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America (London: Pluto Press, 1998).

For example The Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Acts of 1976, 1989; The Equal Pay Act 1970 and The Education Reform (Northern Ireland) Order 1989. Although these were designed to promote equality through legislation the legacy of inequality remains. See Committee on the Administration of Justice Report, Equality in Northern Ireland: The Rhetoric and the Reality (Belfast: Committee on the Administration of Justice, 2006).

For example, in 1991 a Helsinki Watch Mission concluded that ‘human rights abuses are persistent and on-going, that they affect Protestants and Catholics alike, and that they are committed by both security forces and paramilitary groups in violation of international human rights and humanitarian laws and standards’, Helsinki Human Rights Watch Report, 1991, published by Human Rights Watch, p. 5. See http://cain.ulster.ac.uk (accessed 1 September 2010) for a full list of Amnesty International's Reports on Northern Ireland from 1971 onwards.

Non-jury trials established by the British Government in 1972 to try cases where there was potential for witness intimidation and to serve as an alternative to internment. They were abolished in July 2007.

Interview 24 with human rights advocate working in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, dated 7 August 2007.

Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships.

Peter Shirlow and Brendan Murtagh, Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City (London: Pluto Press, 2006).

Interview 24 (note 72).

Interview 9 with 48-year-old male community activist from a Loyalist community, dated 26 November 2006.

Interview 4 with 53-year-old male community activist (former Republican prisoner) from a Republican community, dated 22 June 2006.

Interview 3 with human rights advocate, dated 23 July 2005.

Interview 5 with young 26-year-old male community activist from a Republican community, dated 22 June 2006.

Colin Coulter, Contemporary Northern Irish Society, Contemporary Irish Studies, ed. Peter Shirlow (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 99.

Interview 19 with 41-year-old female community activist from a Republican community dated 14 November 2007.

E. Cairns, J. Van Til and A. Williamson, ‘Social Capital, Collectivism-Individualism and Community Background in Northern Ireland: A Report to the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister and the Head of the Voluntary and Community Unit of the Department of Social Development’, (March 2004), 26.

Interview 13 with 50-year-old female community activist from a Loyalist community, dated 13 June 2008.

Interview 19 (note 81).

Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968).

Interview 21 interview with 40-year-old female community activist, dated 22 May 2008.

Interview 11 with 60-year-old female community activist from a Loyalist community, dated 7 June 2007.

Jan E. Dizard and Howard Gadlin, The Minimal Family (Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990) cited in Conner, The Sociology of Loyalty, 58.

Interview 13 (note 83).

Interview 6 with 47-year-old male community activist (former Loyalist prisoner) from a Loyalist community, dated 23 June 2006.

Interview 9 (note 76).

Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships.

Beirne, ‘Social and Economic Rights as Agents for Change’, 57.

Interview 4 (note 77).

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Interview 5 (see note 79).

Interview 19 (note 81).

Interview 20 with 42-year-old female community activist from a Republican community, dated 20 February 2007.

Interview 4 (note 77).

Interview 13 (note 83).

Richard Sennett, Respect: The Formation of Character in a World of Inequality (London: Allan Lane The Penguin Press, 2003), 44.

Swidler, ‘Culture and Social Action’, 173.

V. Turner, ‘Liminality and mortality’, Firestone Lecture, delivered University of California, 1980, cited in Hilda Ellis Davidson, ‘Introduction’, in Boundaries and Thresholds: Papers from the colloquim of the Katherine Brigs Club (Gloucester: Thimble Press, 1993).

Fiona Samson, ‘Heidegger and the Aporia: Translation and Cultural Authenticity’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9, no. 4 (2006): 527–39.

Swidler, ‘Culture and Social Action’.

Agnes Horvath, Bjorn Thomassen and Harald Wydra, ‘Introduction’, International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009), Special Issue: Liminality and Cultures of Change, http://www.ipa3.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=249:introduction-liminality-and-cultures-of-change&catid=58:articles&Itemid=336 (accessed 1 September 2010).

Swidler, ‘Culture and Social Action’, 306.

Bryan S. Turner, ‘A Sociology of Citizenship and Human Rights: Does Social Theory still exist?’, in Interpreting Human Rights: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Rhiannon Morgan and Bryan S. Turner (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 183.

Morris, ‘A Foundation for Rights or Theories of Practice?’.

Ibid., 244–5.

Lydia Morris, Asylum, Welfare and the Cosmopolitan Ideal (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 157.