The aim of this book is to analyse whether the implementation of the peacebuilding elements of the Belfast Agreement contributed to the transformation of the protracted Northern Ireland Conflict. Therefore, this book deals with the following sections of the Agreement: Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity, Decommissioning, Security, Policing and Justice, and Prisoners. The author comes to the conclusion that the majority of the peacebuilding elements contributed to the transformation of the Northern Ireland Conflict. The results of the study were obtained in conducting interviews, in consulting surveys, and in studying reports and other relevant literature on the recent developments in Northern Ireland.

Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.

This book examines the role of economic aid in the management and resolution of protracted ethnic conflicts, focusing on the case study of Northern Ireland. The book describes the results of a study of the role of economic aid within Northern Ireland, through the viewpoints of citizens collected in an opinion poll as well as community group leaders whose projects received funding, funding-agency civil servants and development officers. The study explains the importance of economic and social development in promoting cross-community contact as well as within single-identity communities, and the need for a multitrack intervention approach to transform the conflict in Northern Ireland. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of how economic assistance impacts on a divided society with a history of protracted violence and provides important perspectives on the "peace through development" idea. One of the key unanswered questions relating to economic aid and preventing future violence is that of the significance of external economic aid in building peace after violence. By examining the respondents’ political imagery, this book expands on existing work on economic aid and peace building in other societies coming out of violence. Northern Ireland’s changing social-economic and political context reflects the fact that economic aid and sustainable economic development is a cornerstone of the peacebuilding process. The goal of the book is to provide a foundational knowledge base for students and practitioners about the role of economic aid in building the peace dividend in post-accord societies. The book will be of great interest to students of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, Irish politics, peace and conflict studies, and politics and IR in general.

This book uses the case of Northern Ireland to evaluate theoretical approaches in international relations. It investigates the process of negotiation that led to the signing of the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement and the continuing challenges to peace reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Incorporating the work of leading scholars, it explores a wide range of topics, including the function of deception in promoting peace, the question of partition and how it was reimagined by nationalists such as John Hume, and how the decommissioning process led to a role in internal policing for paramilitaries. The influence of outside actors - notably the United States and the European Union - is also considered, along with the involvement of the Catholic Church and the marginalization of women. This book will be important for academics interested in theories of international relations and to a wider public interested in understanding the Northern Ireland peace process.

This volume seeks to move beyond structure and agency perspectives by suggesting that social movement theories are best suited to foster a perspective that entails 1) an actor-based approach to the Troubles; and 2) the contextualization of contentious politics, or how the contingent and ever-evolving political contexts/opportunities/threats shaped the trajectory of the Troubles. Recent social movement scholarship has proved to be particularly useful in situating the emergence, continuation, and demise of political violence within a larger context of multiple conflicts, in which radical contention is only one possible outcome. Social movement theories also avoid the essentialization of political groups as 'radical' or 'violent'; instead, they place all political actors participating to contention, from paramilitaries to state authorities, within their complex organizational fields, emphasizing their shifting strategies as they interact with each other and adapt to the political context.

National human rights institutions—state agencies charged with protecting and promoting human rights domestically—have proliferated dramatically since the 1990s; today more than a hundred countries have NHRIs, with dozens more seeking to join the global trend. These institutions are found in states of all sizes—from the Maldives and Barbados to South Africa, Mexico, and India; they exist in conflict zones and comparatively stable democracies alike. In Chains of Justice, Sonia Cardenas offers a sweeping historical and global account of the emergence of NHRIs, linking their growing prominence to the contradictions and possibilities of the modern state. As human rights norms gained visibility at the end of the twentieth century, states began creating NHRIs based on the idea that if international human rights standards were ever to take root, they had to be firmly implanted within countries—impacting domestic laws and administrative practices and even systems of education. However, this very position within a complex state makes it particularly challenging to assess the design and influence of NHRIs: some observers are inclined to associate NHRIs with ideals of restraint and accountability, whereas others are suspicious of these institutions as "pretenders" in democratic disguise. In her theoretically and politically grounded examination, Cardenas tackles the role of NHRIs, asking how we can understand the global diffusion of these institutions, including why individual states decide to create an NHRI at a particular time while others resist the trend. She explores the influence of these institutions in states seeking mostly to appease international audiences as well as their value in places where respect for human rights is already strong. The most comprehensive account of the NHRI phenomenon to date, Chains of Justice analyzes many institutions never studied before and draws from new data released from the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism of the United Nations Human Rights Council. With its global scope and fresh insights into the origins and influence of NHRIs, Chains of Justice promises to become a standard reference that will appeal to scholars immersed in the workings of these understudied institutions as well as nonspecialists curious about the role of the state in human rights.

The book introduces a theoretical framework to understand the role of religious leaders in conflict transformation and peacebuilding.