The Perpetual Peace Process? Examining Northern Ireland's Never-ending, but Fundamentally Altering Peace Process

Abstract

This article argues that Northern Ireland's ‘perpetual’ peace process needs to be examined in the context of the events at the time. There is a tendency in some of the literature to read the result of the peace process back into its origins and development. Such accounts have misinterpreted the reasons for the emergence of the peace process and have criticised the actions of parties based on interpretations that could not have been made confidently at the time. Drawing on path dependency literature, this article employs process tracing to illustrate that the peace process of today is fundamentally different in both focus and purpose from the variant that existed in the early 1990s. The trajectory of the peace process and its outcome are comprehensible only if the objectives of the parties to the conflict are identified and the ways in which they altered over the period evaluated. The fundamental changes in the politics of Northern Ireland during the peace process led to the parties eventually accepting outcomes that many of them appeared to be categorically unwilling to countenance in earlier phases. This article examines and explains how the peace process resulted in the Democratic Unionist Party–Sinn Féin-led power-sharing government.

Keywords:

• peace process
• Northern Ireland
• conflict resolution
• path dependency

Acknowledgements

The author is extremely grateful to Dr Cillian McGrattan, and one of the anonymous reviewers, for some very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, particularly in relation to the theoretical literature on path dependency and process tracing. The usual disclaimer applies.