Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been considered a conflict-resolution success story. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement provided a framework for managing a long-standing ethnonational conflict, and has ushered in relative political stability. The consociational features of the Northern Ireland Assembly can be seen either as necessary for managing conflict or as institutionalizing sectarianism so that politics along left–right lines cannot emerge. Although there is evidence for the development of a “Northern Irish” identity to counter competing British and Irish identities, Northern Ireland is a long way from transcending the sectarian structures that shape almost all aspects of social and political life. Northern Ireland remains segregated along religious lines and is also prone to tensions around the anniversaries of atrocities and the public use of symbols and rituals. The failure to systematically “deal with the past” through public information recovery and truth-telling mechanisms also seems to have hindered progress toward reconciliation.

The politics of age in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the attempt to strengthen the political, social and policy status of aging in Northern Ireland in the context of the regions emergence from decades of ethno-religious conflict. Supported by the US based Atlantic Philanthropies, the paper shows how the NGO sector restructured, became more tactical about its use of evidence and experimented with social enterprise models to strengthen the rights of the most excluded old in the region. This change process is inevitably incomplete and not everything worked but it did create a new political landscape that placed older people at the heart of protest and advocacy about the issues that affect their daily lives.

Education for global citizenship in Scotland: reciprocal partnership or politics of benevolence?

Links between schools in the United Kingdom and partner schools in developing countries are an increasingly popular approach to teaching global citizenship. This study addresses the limited empirical research to date on the influence of such links on pupils' learning and understanding. Following an overview of the curricular theme of global citizenship in the Scottish curriculum and in the context of a partnership between Scotland and Malawi, challenges and potential pitfalls of teaching global citizenship are illustrated by the voices of pupils at four schools. Data is analysed through the themes of knowledge and understanding, concerns about fairness, and giving and helping. We reflect on whether our study indicates the intended reciprocal partnership or a 'politics of benevolence'.