The Belfast Agreement and the Politics of Consociationalism: A Critique

Recognition Theory as Social Research

“…Academic observers who have criticized, from an individualist liberal perspective, the arrangements that were agreed in 1998 argue that bi-national consociationalism has taken us in the wrong direction altogether (Taylor 2001(Taylor , 2006. The institutional arrangements are said to 'entrench' (Wilford and Wilson 2003, pp.…”

Plying Nostrums or Exporting Peace Models? An Examination of the Contradictions Between the Northern Irish Peace Process and International Peacebuilding

“…73 In this way, the region has witnessed the growth of a strong trade union movement dedicated to promoting class based interests as opposed to sectarian Downloaded by [Colorado College] at 17:37 01 December 2014 ones, and a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender social movement, which has mobilized to advance intercultural relations and tolerance. 74 Another strand to the relationship between civil society and peace concerns the state funded community development sector, which particularly since the early 1980s has sought to encourage harmonious relations between the groups.…”

Politics beyond identity: reconsidering the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland

“…Indeed, within consociational scholarship, the most influential body of work with regard to the peace process (Finlay 2010;Taylor 2009), the conflict is seen to be the result of the clash between the Irish nationalist minority's struggle for state recognition and the limitations of the liberal state in terms of providing such recognition (McGarry and O'Leary 2009;O'Duffy 1999O'Duffy , 2000O'Neill 2007;Taylor 2006). Thus, influential writers such as McGarry (2001, 127) posit the centrality of the search for identitarian recognition and the role of state institutions in guaranteeing that recognition, arguing that 'national minorities…seek more than to be treated as equal individuals within someone else's nation state or to be given a limited form of cultural recognition on par with immigrant minorities.…”

“…Critics have raised concerns about the institutionalisation of ethnic or ethno-national identities (Finlay 2010;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;Taylor 2006), thus risking the reproduction of the very sectarian relations deemed to be at the heart of the conflict (Taylor 2006;Wilford and Wilson 2001). Others have pointed to the depoliticising reduction of Irish republicanism to the terms of identity (McVeigh andRolston 2007, 2009;Byrne 2012) and the exclusion of women (Whitaker 2004), queer communities (Conrad 2006), class politics (Coulter 1999), migrants (Chan 2006) and those who do not identify with either of the 'two communities' (Finlay 2010).…”