The pre-1969 historiography of the Northern Ireland conflict: a reappraisal

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (156) ◽  
pp. 659-681
Author(s):  
Brian Lambkin
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article contributes to the the mapping of the ‘pathways of transmission’ of the Northern Ireland ‘problem’ by drawing attention to three problematic aspects of John Whyte’s appraisal of the pre-1969 historiography, inInterpreting Northern Ireland(1990): that the work of T. W. Moody and J. C. Beckett and their fellow historians before 1969 was ‘lightweight’ and ‘bland’; that they effectively ignored Ulster’s history of sectarian rioting until Andrew Boyd’s bookHoly war in Belfast(1969) brought it ‘back into the consciousness of historians’; and that the ‘external conflict paradigm’ was ‘dominant’ in their discourse. These are examined in sections II–V. The content of the pre-1969 historiography is examined in section I and a preliminary reappraisal is offered in section VI.

The Northern Ireland Conflict: New Wine in Old Bottles?

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Sabine Wichert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of

James Loughlin, The Ulster Question since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 151 pp., £10.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–60616–7.David Harkness, Ireland in the Twentieth Century. Divided Island (London: Macmillan, 1996), 190 pp., £9.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–56796–X.Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–1996 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 347 pp., £12.99 (pb), £40.00 (hb), ISBN 0–333–73162–X.Brian A. Follis, A State Under Siege. The Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 250 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–198–20305–5.Dermot Keogh and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., Northern Ireland and the Politics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–521–44430–6.William Crotty and David Schmitt, eds., Ireland and the Politics of Change (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 264 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–32894–2.David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland. Culture, Ideology and Colonialism. (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 344 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–30287–0.Anthony D. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney, Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Identity in Northern Ireland (Washington: Smithonian Institution Press, 1996), 270 pp., £34.75 (hb), ISBN 1–560–98520–8.John D. Brewer, with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: the mote and the beam (London: Macmillan, 1998), 248 pp., £16.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–74635–X.During the last three decades, and accompanying the ‘troubles’, the literature on Northern Ireland has mushroomed. Within the last ten years two surveys have attempted to summarise and categorise the major interpretations. John Whyte's Interpreting Northern Ireland covered the 1970s and 1980s and came to the conclusion that traditional Unionist and nationalist interpretations, with their emphasis on external, that is British and Irish, forces as the cause for the problem, had begun to lose out to ‘internal conflict’ interpretations. He felt, however, that this approach, too, was coming to the end of its usefulness, and he expected the emergence of a new paradigm shortly.

Discrimination and Control in Ireland

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob N. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Organizational Analysis ◽  
Negotiated Settlement ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Volunteer Force ◽  
And Control

This chapter studies the three most prominent terrorist groups operating in Northern Ireland from the 1960s through 2003: the Provisional IRA, the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Because the history of terrorism in Northern Ireland is so well known, the case provides an excellent venue for testing hypotheses about the relationship between discrimination and control. The history of the groups fighting in Northern Ireland also provides a critical illustration of the policy importance of this kind of organizational analysis. From 1987 on, leaders on both sides of the Northern Ireland conflict understood the broad contours of a negotiated settlement, but it took them many years to work the internal politics of their organizations to the point at which ceasefire orders were obeyed.

scholarly journals Cooperation and conflict: field experiments in Northern Ireland

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1792) ◽  
pp. 20141435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio S. Silva ◽  
Ruth Mace
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Field Experiments ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Cooperative Behaviour ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Group Cooperation ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of

The idea that cohesive groups, in which individuals help each other, have a competitive advantage over groups composed of selfish individuals has been widely suggested as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation in humans. Recent theoretical models propose the coevolution of parochial altruism and intergroup conflict, when in-group altruism and out-group hostility contribute to the group's success in these conflicts. However, the few empirical attempts to test this hypothesis do not use natural groups and conflate measures of in-group and unbiased cooperative behaviour. We conducted field experiments based on naturalistic measures of cooperation (school/charity donations and lost letters' returns) with two religious groups with an on-going history of conflict—Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Conflict was associated with reduced donations to out-group schools and the return of out-group letters, but we found no evidence that it influences in-group cooperation. Rather, socio-economic status was the major determinant of cooperative behaviour. Our study presents a challenge to dominant perspectives on the origins of human cooperation, and has implications for initiatives aiming to promote conflict resolution and social cohesion.

Introduction: The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: impacts, engagements, legacies and memories

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dawson ◽  
Stephen Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opening Up

The introduction, and the book more generally, addresses a paradox: that the Northern Ireland conflict, commonly known as ‘the Troubles’, has had profound and shaping impacts upon politics, culture and the lives of many thousands of people in Great Britain, producing lasting legacies that continue to resonate nearly half a century after the eruption of political violence in 1968-9; but that engagements with the conflict, and with its ‘post-conflict’ transformation, from within Britain have been limited, lacking, frequently problematic, often troubled, in ways that are not fully grasped or considered. The book, then, has four main aims: to investigate the history of responses to, engagements with, and memories of the Northern Irish conflict in Britain; to explore absences and weaknesses or silences in this history; to promote a wider academic and public debate in Britain concerning the significance of this history, and the lessons to be learned from the post-conflict efforts to ‘deal with the past’ in Northern Ireland; and to provoke reflection on the significance of opening up hitherto unexamined histories and memories of the Troubles, and the ways in which ongoing conflicts between competing understandings of the past might be addressed and negotiated.

The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland

1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan O'Leary
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict

The merits of consociation as a means of solving the Northern Ireland conflict are presented through contrasting it with other ways of stabilizing highly divided political systems. Why voluntary consociation has been unsuccessful in Northern Ireland and unfortunately is likely to remain so is explained. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) must be understood against the background of the failure of previous consociational experiments. The AIA partly represented a shift in British strategy from voluntary to coercive consociationalism. The prospects for this coercive consociational strategy and variants on it are evaluated. Irish history is something Irishmen should never remember, and Englishmen should never forget.

The History of the Holy War: Ambroise's ‘Estoire de la Guerre Sainte’

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-533
Author(s):  
Linda M. Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Holy War ◽  
History Of

The exit option: mediation and the termination of negotiations in the Northern Ireland conflict

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall O´ Dochartaigh ◽  
Isak Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Third Party ◽  
British Government ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Irish Republican Army ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
Exit Option ◽  
Information Advantage ◽  
The Uk

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the mediation exit option, which is one of the most important tactics available to any third party mediator.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyzes a crucial intermediary channel between the Irish Republican Army (hereafter IRA) and the British Government utilizing unique material from the private papers of the intermediary, Brendan Duddy, including diaries that cover periods of intensive communication, extensive interviews with the intermediary and with participants in this communication on both the British Government and Irish Republican sides as well as recently released official papers from the UK National Archives relating to this communication.FindingsThe study reveals how the intermediary channel was used in order to get information, how the third party and the primary parties traded in asymmetries of information, and how the intermediary utilized the information advantage to increase the credibility of his threats of termination.Research limitations/implicationsThe study outlines an avenue for further research on the termination dynamics of mediation.Practical implicationsUnderstanding the conditions for successfully using the exit‐option is vital for policy‐makers, in particular for peace diplomacy efforts in other contexts than the Northern Ireland one.Originality/valueThe paper challenges previous explanations for why threats by mediators to call off further mediation attempts are successful and argues that a mediator can use the parties' informational dependency on him in order to increase his leverage and push the parties towards settlement.

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