Rethinking Northern Ireland provides a coherent and critical account of the Northern Ireland conflict. Most writing on Northern Ireland is informed by British propaganda, unionist ideology or currently popular 'ethnic conflict' paradigm which allows analysts to wallow in a fascination with tribal loyalty. Rethinking Northern Ireland sets the record straight by reembedding the conflict in Ireland in the history of an literature on imperialism and colonialism. Written by Irish, Scottish and English women and men it includes material on neglected topics such as the role of Britain, gender, culture and sectarianism. It presents a formidable challenge to the shibboleths of contemporary debate on Northern Ireland. A just and lasting peace necessitates thorough re-evaluation and Rethinking Northern Ireland provides a stimulus to that urgent task.

Rethinking Northern Ireland provides a coherent and critical account of the Northern Ireland conflict. Most writing on Northern Ireland is informed by British propaganda, unionist ideology or currently popular 'ethnic conflict' paradigm which allows analysts to wallow in a fascination with tribal loyalty. Rethinking Northern Ireland sets the record straight by reembedding the conflict in Ireland in the history of an literature on imperialism and colonialism. Written by Irish, Scottish and English women and men it includes material on neglected topics such as the role of Britain, gender, culture and sectarianism. It presents a formidable challenge to the shibboleths of contemporary debate on Northern Ireland. A just and lasting peace necessitates thorough re-evaluation and Rethinking Northern Ireland provides a stimulus to that urgent task.

In 2021, Northern Ireland will commemorate its centenary, but Brexit, more than any other event in that 100-year history, has jeopardised its very existence. Events since 2016 have complicated political relationships within Northern Ireland and further destabilised the devolved institutions established in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Feargal Cochrane’s urgent analysis argues that Brexit is breaking peace in Northern Ireland, making it the most significant event since Partition. Endless negotiations and uncertainty have brought contested identities back to the forefront of political debate. Always so much more than a line on a map, the border has become an existential marker of identity as well as a reminder of the dark days of violent conflict. This insightful book explores how and why the Brexit negotiations have been so destabilising for politics in Northern Ireland, opening the door to a violent past.

Assesses the impact of political, non-violent resolution efforts in the Northern Irish and Turkish-Kurdish peace processes This book challenges the notion of 'conflict resolution' in the Northern Irish and Turkish-Kurdish peace processes, both far-reaching ethno-nationalist conflicts in the post-Cold War era. Incorporating fieldwork carried out until 2015, İ. Aytaç Kadıoğlu compares these conflicts during major peace attempts, from early secret talks and semi-official peace initiatives, to multilateral and internationalised conflict resolution processes through not only main armed protagonists, but also independent third parties. As Brexit re-ignites discussion around the border of Northern Ireland, and as the repercussions of the Syrian civil war on the dynamics of the Kurdish conflict continue to unfold, these two cases are particularly important to the study of conflict resolution. In critically assessing existing literature, this book presents an innovative framework for conflict resolution processes, suggesting that ethno-nationalist conflicts are too complex to be resolved solely through official negotiations. Key Features - Offers an important contribution to conflict resolution research, theorising the various stages involved in the attempted resolution of asymmetric conflicts - Relies on primary sources, including interviews and recently declassified archival papers to reveal the insights of both peace processes - Presents an innovative framework for conflict resolution, a starting-point for further research on managing peace processes and ethno-nationalist conflicts İ. Aytaç Kadıoğlu is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Adiyaman University.

"A welcome and brilliantly crafted overview of this field. It represents a major advance in our understanding of how ethnicity works in specific social and cultural contexts. The second edition will be an invaluable resource for both students and researchers alike." - John Solomos, City University, London The first edition of Rethinking Ethnicity quickly established itself as a popular text for students of ethnicity and ethnic relations. This fully revised and updated second edition adds new material on globalization and the recent debates about whether ethnicity matters and ethnic groups actually exist. While ethnicity - as a social construct - is imagined, its effects are far from imaginary. Jenkins draws on specific examples to demonstrate the social mechanisms that construct ethnicity and the consequences for people′s experience. Drawing upon rich case study material, the book discusses such issues as: the ′myth′ of the plural society; postmodern notions of difference; the relationship between ethnicity, ′race′ and nationalism; ideology; language; violence and religion; and the everyday construction of national identity.

Consociational power sharing is often perceived to be the method of conflict management that is most likely to succeed in deeply divided societies. The case of Northern Ireland in particular is heralded by many as a consociational success story. Since the signing of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in 1998, significant conflict transformation has taken place in the form of a considerable reduction in levels of violence and the establishment of power sharing between unionists and nationalists. This book looks at what consociational power sharing achieves after its implementation – specifically, whether it can work to overcome existing identities in divided societies, or whether it simply freezes divisions. It argues that if consociational power sharing is facilitating a move towards a genuinely shared society, this would be demonstrated in the focus of the election campaigns of Northern Ireland’s political parties, which would be almost exclusively based around socio-economic issues affecting the whole population, rather than narrow single identity concerns. However, the book claims that, on the whole, this has not been realised. Although election campaigns are today less strident than they were in the pre-1998 era, it remains the case that they usually foreground single identity symbolism, as it is this that resonates with voters. Whilst consociational power sharing has been very successful in reducing levels of violent conflict and facilitating elite level cooperation between unionists and nationalists, it has been much less successful in reducing divisions within wider society to facilitate a genuinely shared Northern Irish identity. By establishing an important middle ground between consociational proponents and critics, this research will be of significant interest to students and scholars of ethnic politics, political sociology, conflict management, and divided societies more generally.

For almost three decades the troubles in Northern Ireland raged, claiming over 3,600 lives, with civilians accounting for almost half the fatalities. In this book, Jonathan Tonge examines the reasons for that conflict; the motivations of the groups involved and explores the prospects for a post-conflict Northern Ireland. The book: assesses the motivations and campaigns of the IRA, UVF and UDA and other armed groups discusses what each paramilitary group achieved through violence analyses the continuing controversies surrounding the Northern Irelands dirty war outlines the extent of collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries explores how governments and political parties shaped the peace process scrutinizes prospects for the political development of unionism and nationalism within a devolved power sharing framework examines whether the sectarian divide is strengthening or weakening concludes by assessing whether Northern Ireland can move permanently from violence and instability to become a normal peaceful polity, in which the war is merely a historic relic Written by an acknowledged expert in the field, Northern Ireland combines incisive analysis, original research and a lucid style to provide an important assessment of what has been described as an 800 year old problem.