Intervening in Northern Ireland

Critically Re-thinking Representations of the Conflict

Marysia Zalewski, John Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415373142
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317983712
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The articles in this special issue, drawn from a workshop hosted by the Institute of Governance, Queen's University, Belfast, explicitly engage with and challenge conventional academic analyses in order to confront the ways in which the conflict on Northern Ireland has traditionally been represented and understood.

Part of the reason for adopting this approach is because it is suggested that to a certain extent, academic analyses have defined the parameters of the conflict which has necessarily had implications for the shape of ensuing solutions. A further claim is that the persistent historical and political search for causes and solutions may be constitutive of the problems that conventional analysts seek to resolve. The articles in the first part introduce and problematize traditional analyses of the conflict. Additionally, these essays explain alternative approaches offering other ways of thinking about how the 'problem' of Northern Ireland has been constituted. The second part comprises empirically focused essays, each either engaging with or confronting the issue of the liberal hegemony that defines most analyses of the conflict. The final essay returns to more explicitly re-consider how the 'problem' of Northern Ireland has been theorized, represented and understood.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Intervening in Northern Ireland: Critically re-thinking representations of the conflict

MARYSIA ZALEWSKI

I find Northern Ireland unreadable (Morrisey 2003: 7).

When I arrived in Northern Ireland in 1999 to take up my appointment at Queen's University, Belfast, one of the bureaucratic forms I was required to complete asked this question: ‘Would you be perceived as being from a Catholic or Protestant background?’ This question was presumably designed to monitor access to employment with a view to ameliorating unfair practices, yet what kinds of assumptions inhabit its asking – and ordains the answers available? Given my own very traditional Catholic upbringing and my Polish name, I assumed – rather naively in retrospect – that I might be perceived as Catholic. I had not seriously considered that my English accent would mark me out as (probably) Protestant, or certainly not the right kind of Catholic. Having rejected Catholicism some decades ago, it came as a surprise to me that I found myself wanting to be linked with a category – to attach to an identity that I had consciously and consistently discarded. This desire was not necessarily for political reasons and certainly not for religious ones, yet there was something about this (mis)appropriated identity and my related ineffectual agency that troubled me.

That ‘simple’, well-intentioned question invoked deeply sedimented ways of thinking about, and of not thinking about, of understanding, and of not understanding, what has become so well known as ‘the conflict in Northern Ireland’, or more colloquially, ‘the Troubles’. Yet at the same time that it represented the ‘obvious’, it also seemed to invoke the many ‘things not said, moments not remembered’ (Eisenstein 2004: 25), the ‘whispered silences’ (Vaughan-Williams 2006: 519), ‘what we take for granted’ (Finlayson 2006: 554), ‘the gaps that haunt our speech’ (Kay 2003: 7) and the many ghosts that lay in wait to make and capture meaning. The question is so definitive and decisive despite its gesture toward subjective interpretation by the inclusion of the word ‘perceived’. That there was/is a conflict and that it was/is primarily related to Catholicism (and republicanism) and Protestantism (and loyalism) is surely enshrined in the question – are you a Catholic or Protestant? Moreover, that there was/is a conflict in need of resolving is never cast into doubt.

As the various revisions of this essay have proceeded, a number of issues have hit the headlines related to the conflict and associated peace process in Northern Ireland. At one point, the media was enthusiastically reporting ‘Northern Ireland awaits Paisley's decision’,¹ referring to an impending deal between the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin (SF). The possibility of power-sharing between the two ‘extreme’, but currently (at the time of writing) most popular (electorally speaking) parties is widely regarded to be a covenant of historic proportions and one that holds the best chance of finally extinguishing the enduring violence in Northern Ireland (see Vaughan-Williams 2006). Does the arrival of the potential for such a deal – successful at this time or not – suggest that the millions of words that have been produced about the ‘Troubles’, especially through scholarly works, have significantly deepened our understanding about the conflict, and perhaps even facilitated the progress toward peace? Yet since this time, the Assembly is still ‘on hold’; the DUP and Sinn Féin are not power sharing;² a bank robbery in North Belfast of immense proportions (around £22 million) has been attributed to the IRA (accompanied by the implication, explicit and implicit, of Sinn Féin's complicity in the robbery); the IRA has withdrawn its commitment to decommission all of its weapons, additionally commenting that the British and Irish governments should not underestimate the seriousness of this decision; loyalist in-fighting has resulted in increased levels of violence,³ the murder of Robert McCartney outside a Belfast pub allegedly by members of the IRA followed by a ‘cover-up’ of forensic evidence, again allegedly by the IRA; and at the moment of typing these words news reports are coming through indicating that the president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, has urged the IRA to abandon armed struggles in favour of political activism⁴ – all of this, has, for many, left the peace process still extremely vulnerable and the conflict still perceived and represented as ‘intractable’.⁵

It is not however, the intention either in this or the subsequent essays to primarily focus on the question of whether there was/is or was not/is not a conflict in Northern Ireland. Neither is the intention to offer an alternative explanation for, or solution to the conflict, rather it is to interrogate the constitution of ways in which we have thought the specific configuration of the conflict into existence and to show some of the violent effects of this. It has been said that ‘over the last three decades literally thousands of academic books and articles have sought to address the various issues associated with ‘the Troubles’ (Coulter 1999: 1). If this is the case, how is it that for some ‘Northern Ireland is [still] unreadable’? (Morrisey 2003:7); or that for many, it is still intractable? I do not want to suggest that those thousands/millions of words have ‘got it wrong’ or are simply ‘not quite right yet’, but rather I am proposing that it is necessary to critically reflect on the languages, structures of argumentation and philosophies that have traditionally been deployed to make sense of the political landscape in Northern Ireland. If, as Zillah Eisenstein claims, ‘language is the only means we have to name … and it also gets emptied of meaning … each word is filtered through the concentrated power of our times, which selfishly captures meaning for itself’ (2004: 4), I think it is important to undertake this task. Taking Eisenstein's proposition further, another crucial reason for pursuing this work in this collection is the suspicion that the thousands of scholarly words that have produced much of the conventional analyses of the conflict may be partly constitutive of the very problems that analysts seek to resolve.

A central instigation for embarking on this approach to thinking about representations of the conflict is related to major changes in social and political theory over the last few decades. These changes, I suggest, give us cause to reflect on a number of issues which broadly coalesce around two main interrelated registers; the relationship of scholarly work to political and social practices, and the character and possibilities of political intervention. The appropriate relationship between scholarly work or the work of intellectuals and the ‘real world’ is a persistently vexed one. One view is that the work produced in Universities is importantly related to, and should be in the service of, relieving the burden of social and political problems. Alternative views suggest that scholarly work is often too remote from matters of social and political significance and consequently is of little practical help. One recent example of this view is reflected in a comment made by Peter Hain (the current secretary of state for Northern Ireland) who suggested that academic work was not helpful in dealing with the ‘real’ politics of the situation in Northern Ireland.⁶ By contrast the essays in this volume aim not to supply an alternative explanation for, or solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland – but rather to critically question the constitution of ‘a problem’ which appears in need of ‘solving’.

As I shall argue in the next section, the tendency among scholarly works on the conflict to offer ‘solutions’ to the Northern Ireland ‘problem’ is largely produced through a specific intellectual framework – one primarily founded on the premises of positivist methodologies and liberal ideologies. This argument is taken up in further depth and detail in subsequent essays. The following section offers an illustration of my own. I shall show how what we might call the default software of liberalism and positivism casts a thick mantle over structures of meaning which then subsequently materialize as irrelevant or tangential. To clarify, I want to indicate some of the ways in which gender works in the constitution of representations of the conflict despite its apparent insignificance or peripherality. I will look at two specific areas; a popular scholarly text on the conflict, namely John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary's Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (1995), and the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, especially in the context of their electoral failure. The final section lays out how similar themes structure the volume as a whole.

The Terrible Press of History⁷

History always hangs heavily on the shoulders of people in Northern Ireland (BBC Radio 4 news, 28 November, 2004).

In his essay in this volume Nick Vaughan-Williams invokes Paul Arthur's rumination that if all the publications about the ‘solutions’ to the Northern Irish ‘problem’ were put side by side they would span the entire circumference of the world (Vaughan-Williams 2006: 513). Given this analytical abundance, it seems counterintuitive to imply that this prolific production has not facilitated comprehension about the causes of the conflict – a conflict which has appeared to be so obviously present. We imagine, or hope, that the production of rigorous research on the conflict is necessarily in the service of enlightenment as to the causes of it. The sense that unless we understand ‘why something happened’, we will be unable to stop it happening holds a firm and familiar position in what we might call the modernist imaginary. (Edkins 2003: 229; see also Finlayson 2006) This ‘cause–knowledge–agency’ equation is rooted both in the popular imagination as well as having a secure position in the conventional production of academic knowledge – perhaps especially in the social and political sciences broadly speaking. Indeed the label ‘science’, when linked to the production of knowledge about society and politics, has precisely been used to attach the characteristics of objectivity and truth associated with the generation of scientific knowledge to the production of social knowledge. This broad equation is critically engaged in this collection of essays (see especially Edkins 2006, Sampson 2006 and Vaughan-Williams 2006). The intention is not to slide another layer of positivist knowledge on top of this already heavy burden but rather to re-consider conventional representations of the conflict and to offer other ways to think about how we think about the conflict.

The past few decades have witnessed a major change in the character of social and political theory. Steven Seidman and John Alexander refer to this as ‘a dramatic shift in the identity of social theory [which] materialized in the course of the 1990s’, a shift which is primarily characterized by a sustained attack on the foundations of traditional social theory (Seidman & Alexander 2001: 1; see also Brown 2001; Derrida 1994, 2002; Edkins 2006; Vaughan-Williams 2006). One consequence of this shift has been a loss of confidence in ‘absolute frames of reference’ (Lather 2001: 221), which for many have instigated the desire to ‘think otherwise’ about how to think about matters deemed to be of significance, such as the conflict in Northern Ireland. One of our suggestions is that much thinking/theorizing⁸ about the conflict emerges from a long-standing and hugely influential ‘absolute frame of reference’, namely liberal philosophical and associated positivist methodological discourses. To be sure, ‘liberalism’ is, in some senses, multi-faceted and we are mindful of the problems of constructing a ‘straw-man’⁹ which we then proceed to diminish. Yet there is surely something about liberalism, broadly conceived, that is conducive to explication.

Perhaps one way to think about this is in the context of the roles and functions of liberalism in the tradition of modernity which can initially be identified by an enduring commitment to a significant cluster of building blocks which prefigure and inform what we (can) think of – and what we think of – as political (Brown 2001: 5). One of these building blocks revolves around a belief in teleological and progressive history suggestive of a linear narrative of events with a view to understanding the past in order to understand the present en route to making the future better. This Enlightenment idea, when conjoined with the scientistic or positivist methodological approaches appropriate to and emblematic of liberal ideologies and practices, would appear to provide rich resources to understand, explain and ameliorate the grievous and violent situation that has historically ensconced Northern Ireland. In a society typically perceived as mired in practices of, and ideas about justice, revenge, loss, liberation and retribution, the armoury of liberal and positivist inspired practices of knowledge production have seemed valuable – indeed necessary (see Ashe 2006; Finlayson 2006; Vaughan-Williams 2006). The classically regarded prime assets of Reason and Objectivity associated with liberalism and modernity have presented as obvious tools to be deployed in order to deliver the truth of, and resolution to the conflict. The logic is that despite the flaws and imperfect practices...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Intervening in Northern Ireland: Critically re-thinking representations of the conflict
• Section One: Thinking about the ‘problem’ of ‘Northern Ireland’
• Section Two: (Re)presenting ‘Northern Ireland’
• Index