From Transition to Transformation in Ethnonational Conflict: Some Lessons from Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article focuses on an often undervalued area of academic research between ‘war’ at one extreme and ‘peace’ at the other, namely the transitional period between the two. (The terms ‘war’ and ‘peace’ are used here, and throughout the article, in the knowledge that a substantial body of literature exists that seeks to define the boundaries and conditions of both. It is not the intention to engage directly with these debates, but the words war and peace are used throughout in the understanding that these are complex and multifaceted terms.) The article argues that more emphasis needs to be placed on the process of transition in the period after an agreement has been negotiated but before new structures have transformed conflict relationships. It is argued that this transitional phase is critical to the success or failure of the wider political engineering of such negotiated agreements. The article uses the case of Northern Ireland to examine this transitional moment in the wider architecture of conflict transformation within an ethnonational dispute. It is argued that the key to the success of such a fragile peace is to be found in the capacity of the transitional process itself to reduce the political logic of violence among the direct actors and their supporters. It is also argued that we need to be sensitive to the differential pace of this transitional process across both the formal and informal political spheres and to the possibility that these can take multiple or even contradictory paths.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and the four anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

The phrase ‘peace process’ is used here for linguistic convenience and to connect with popular understandings of the period. The author is aware that this is a problematic and contested definition for many, but it will be used without caveats or quotation marks being entered on every occasion.

The Good Friday Agreement is also known as the Belfast Agreement. Its name derives from the fact that it was reached on Good Friday, 10 April 1998, and was the consequence of 2 years of multi-party negotiations.

While this might be seen as a conceptual weakness it is no more so than other terms that have entered the scholarly lexicon in recent years (e.g. ‘civil society’ can be quite uncivil, the ‘democratic peace’ can be quite undemocratic and ‘good governance’ can cover an array of political sleights of hand).

This is of course a general framing useful for highlighting broad trends. It is recognized that many of these five areas intersect and that the political processes surrounding violent conflicts contain complex and multifaceted dynamics that frequently spill over the boundaries of such categorization.

There are a number of nuances here that cannot be pursued due to space constraints, one of them being the complicated circumstances of unionism's partial support for the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973/74 and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. However, the broad point remains that some unionists were able to accept in the 1990s policy options that were unacceptable to many others during the 1970s (1973/74 in particular).

C. Corrigan, ‘Real IRA, other dissidents use social nets to catch teenagers’, available online at: www.IrishCentral.com

‘Omagh bombing condemned across Northern Ireland’, BBC News Online, 4 April 2011, available online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-12947646

‘Statistics relating to the security situation’, Report No. 5. PSNI Annual Statistical Report, 1 April 2009–31 March 2010, available online at: http://www.psni.police.uk/5._statistics_relating_to_the_security_situation_200910_final.pdf

MI5 Director-General Jonathan Evans, 16 September 2010, available online at: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/the-threat-to-national-security.html

This phrase was used regularly by Sinn Féin during the 1980s and 1990s in an attempt to connect into the discourse of the ANC in South Africa, who used the word prior to the end of the apartheid system in relation to the security services.

This survey, carried out by Prof. Jon Tonge and the University of Liverpool, was published on 7 October 2010. It was widely covered by the media, who used the word ‘support’ rather than ‘sympathy’ in reporting of the story.

D. Keenan, ‘Support for dissidents understated, report finds’, Irish Times, 7 October 2010, available online at: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/1007/1224280567750.html

SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie, speech to 2010 Annual Conference, 6 November 2010, available online at: http://www.sdlp.ie/index.php/newsroom_media/speech/a_new_ireland_for_all_-_leaders_speech_to_conference_2010/

Margaret Ritchie, speech to UUP Annual Conference, 27 October 2007, available online at: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/sdlp/mr271007.htm

While meetings of the British-Irish Association are normally held under ‘Chatham House rules’ of confidentiality and would not normally be cited, Durkan's speech was published on the SDLP website, as detailed in the note below, and the full text is widely available.

SDLP Mark Durkan's speech to the British-Irish Association, Oxford University, 5 September 2008. Full text is available on the SDLP website, available online at: http://www.sdlp.ie/ga/index.php/newsroom_media/newsarticle/mark_durkan_s_speech_to_british_irish_association/

This opinion poll was conducted on behalf of the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister by the independent consultancy Red Circle Communications, available online at: http://www.northernireland.gov.uk/opinion-poll.pdf

N. McAdam & R. Black, ‘Poll: Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness is Northern Ireland's top Minister’, Belfast Telegraph, 30 November 2009, available online at: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/poll-sinn-feins-martin-mcguinness-is-northern-irelands–top-minister-14580892.html

BBC Hearts and Minds, 25 November 2010.

BBC Democracy Live, available online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/northern_ireland/newsid_9431000/9431971.stm