https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

The signing of the Anglo-Irish agreement on Northern Ireland raises once again the question of the political future of the ‘six counties’. The following two articles provide a critical analysis of the recent accord, from two rather different positions. Ronnie Munck sets the accord in its historical and political context, and argues that it is an inherently unstable agreement which will not necessarily resolve the underlying problems. Paul Bew's lively polemic argues forcefully that the accord is at best a substitute for serious structural reforms in the economic and civil liberties field.

Northern Ireland (i)

The religious dimensions of ethnic identities have been under-theorized. In contemporary industrial societies there is a tendency to characterize religiously demarcated groups as ‘really’ ethnic.This article suggests that the religious content of ethnic boundaries may be more important than might initially be assumed. A religious identification may have specific religious content and assumptions that may cause it to operate in different ways from other identities. Even if identities do not seem primarily religious per se, they may have latent religious dimensions that can become reactivated. Whilst identity conflicts and other social struggles may stimulate the return of the religious, once reactivated, the religious dimensions of identity may take on a logic of their own.Therefore, the article argues that in many contexts there is a two-way relationship between religion and ethnicity. Each can stimulate the other, rather than religion simply playing a supporting role to the ethnic centrepiece.

The Religious Content of Ethnic Identities

There appears to be a rift between the theoretical and normative understandings of what reconciliation means and offers, and what people expect to happen in postconflict scenarios. Here we present a conceptual framework that captures the definitional diversity surrounding the concept of reconciliation and then operationalizes it in order to analyze responses from postconflict populations. The illustrative application of our framework to responses from a representative survey of 1,843 Colombian citizens reveals that people’s convictions are just as diverse as scholars’. Nevertheless, significant proportions of respondents seem to understand reconciliation to be primarily a psychological and political process which aims to achieve the re-establishment of quotidian or day-to-day relations and cooperation; which should be preceded by the cessation of violence, dialogue, goodwill, and attitudinal and emotional change; and which should be accompanied by social welfare and security. It is noteworthy that underst...

Reconciliation: A comprehensive framework for empirical analysis

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 distinctive type of ‘thin’ concept which always requiring additional content, 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.

The Roots of Intense Ethnic Conflict May Not in Fact Be Ethnic: Categories, Communities and Path Dependence

Preface and Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction PART I: ANTI-CATHOLICISM AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PROCESS IN IRISH HISTORY Plantation to the United Irishmen: 1600-1799 Union to Partition: 1800-1920 Northern Ireland: 1921-1997 PART II: SOCIOLOGICAL FEATURES OF CONTEMPORARY ANTI-CATHOLICISM The Modes of Contemporary Anti-Catholicism Common-sense Reasoning and Theological Misunderstandings Conclusion Postscript: A Better Way Bibliography

Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: The Mote and the Beam

Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland

Despite the associations with conflict, religion is also a site of reconciliation The limited literature on this, however, is constrained by its case study approach This article seeks to establish a conceptual framework for theorizing the relationship between religion and peacemaking in conflict societies where religion is perceived to be part of the problem The key to this is civil society and the four socially strategic spaces that religious groups can occupy within civil society and by means of which they can play a role as ‘bridging social capital’ in peace processes However, religious peacemaking is mediated by the wider civil-society/state nexus This shows itself in two sets of variables that simultaneously constrain and facilitate the relationship between religion and peacebuilding We illustrate the framework with evidence from several examples in order to show how comparative analysis simultaneously illuminates case studies

Religion and Peacemaking: A Conceptualization:

Anti-Catholicism is part of the dynamics of Northern Ireland's conflict and is critical to the self-defining identity of certain Protestants. However, anti-Catholicism is as much a sociological pro...

Understanding anti-catholicism in northern ireland

Northern Ireland was not the invention of a cartographer who quickly scrambled together an inchoate border in a situation of rapid and violent decolonisation; it had roots, it had cultural and political coherence, and an economic base (cf. the claim of Bowyer Bell (1996: 223) that Ulster had no history or heritage). Protestants did not have to artificially construct a sense of nationhood, for they had long defined their identity around two antinomies or opposites; the one religious, the other national. Northern Ireland defined itself by its Protestantism against Catholicism and by its Britishness against Irishness; Protestantism and Britishness were its core values and they had been established as symbols of Ulster centuries before. This also meant, however, that anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishness continued as central defining tenets of the new state.

Gareth I. Higgins

Papers

Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: The Mote and the Beam

Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland

Religion and Peacemaking: A Conceptualization:

Understanding anti-catholicism in northern ireland

Northern Ireland: 1921–1998