Cold War Along the Emerald Curtain: Rural Boundaries in a Contested Border Zone

This paper examines how anxieties about ethnic identity proliferate as state borders begin to shift and open in response to accelerating possibilities of cross-border cooperation. As the border becomes more porous, social and cultural boundaries become marked in other ways, spatially re-scaled to reflect new uncertainties consequent upon border change. Using an example from the Irish land border, the paper traces how national space is re-imagined and re-placed in the everyday practices of residents in a violent border zone from which the state is ostensibly retreating. It shows that communal division is as sharply drawn as ever at a time when the ‘visibility’ of the state border itself is beginning to diminish.

What Did the Lawyers Do During the 'War' ? Neutrality, Conflcit and the Culture of Quietism

Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this paper explores how lawyers responded to the challenges of entrenched discrimination, sustained political violence and an emerging peace process. Drawing upon the literature of the sociology of lawyering, it examines whether lawyers can or should be more than ‘paid technicians’ in such circumstances. It focuses in particular upon a number of ‘critical junctures’ in the legal history of the jurisdiction and uncouples key elements of the local legal culture which contributed to an ethos of quietism. The paper argues that the version of legal professionalism that emerged in Northern Ireland was contingent and socially constructed and, with notable exceptions, obfuscated a collective failure of moral courage. It concludes that facing the truth concerning past silence is fundamental to a properly embedded rule of law and a more grounded notion of what it means to be a lawyer in a conflict.

Representing War as Punishment in the War on Terror

This paper shows how the notion of punishment has been invoked by former US President George W. Bush, and ex UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to represent war. It is suggested that in this context, the notion of punishment serves different objectives: legitimizing violence, suggesting the sovereign role taken by the US and highlighting the emergence of new sensibilities. Building on previous literature in criminology and international relations it examines points of contact between two previously distinct security mechanisms - war and punishment- and suggests possible effects of this discursive blurring. It highlights not only the need for criminologists to engage with international relations literature but also the need to evaluate closely the different nature of the international context.

Ant-lore in Anglo-Saxon England

Two Old English versions of a sunshine prognostication survive in the mid-eleventh century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391, p. 713, and in a twelfth-century addition to Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 115, 149v–150r. Among standard predictions promising joy, peace, blossom, abundance of milk and fruit, and a great baptism sent by God, one encounters an enigmatic prophecy which involves camels stealing gold from the ants. These gold-digging ants have a long pedigree, one which links Old English with much earlier literature and indicates the extent to which Anglo-Saxon culture had assimilated traditions of European learning. It remains difficult to say what is being prophesied, however, or to explain the presence of the passage among conventional predictions. Whether the prediction was merely a literary exercise or carried a symbolic implication, it must have originated in an ecclesiastical context. Its mixture of classical learning and vernacular tradition, Greek and Latin, folklore and Christian, implies an author with some knowledge of literary and scholarly traditions.

War, peace and suicide: The case of Northern Ireland

Durkheim’s idea that war reduces suicide through greater social and political integration has been used to explain suicide trends during the Northern Ireland conflict and in the period of peace. The applicability of Durkheim is critically evaluated through a case study of suicide trends by age, gender and cause of death over a forty year period. The key finding is that the cohort of children and young people who grew up in the worst years of violence during the 1970s, have the highest and most rapidly increasing suicide rates, and account for the steep upward trend in suicide following the 1998 Agreement. Contrary to Durkheim, the recent rise in suicide involves a complex of social and psychological factors. These include the growth in social isolation, poor mental health arising from the experience of conflict, and the greater political stability of the past decade. The transition to peace means that externalised aggression is no longer socially approved. It becomes internalised instead.

Weather Prognostics in Anglo-Saxon England

Prognostics concerning the day of the week on which kalendae ianuariae and Christmas Day fall, commonly known as the Revelatio Esdrae , purport to be a set of prophecies by the Biblical Esdras. They make predictions about the weather and other natural phenomena for the year to come, and they then extend their predictions to the field of human affairs. A remarkable number of copies of the Revelatio appear in English manuscripts from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Some of these versions have been attributed to Bede and Abbo of Fleury as part of their computus works.

Both R. M. Liuzza and L. S. Chardonnens point out the frequent occurrence of the Revelatio in religious and scientific manuscripts and therefore reject the label of folklore, stressing instead the probable monastic origin of this prognostication. This study will provide the first complete collation and analysis of the surviving exemplars, to give as full an idea as possible of their circumstances of composition, their transmission, and their relationship to one another. It will consider how the Revelatio Esdrae was copied and used in Anglo-Saxon England, the audience to which it was addressed, and whether any conclusion can be drawn from its appearance in particular manuscripts, alongside certain other texts.

The regular occurrence of the Revelatio along with computistical material supports the case for its monastic origin and learned nature. Such a text would have been a helpful handbook to be used by monks and priests, and was among the standard holdings of continental and Anglo-Saxon monasteries and scriptoria, giving further proof of the monks’ intellectual eclecticism and their knowledge of the kinds of continental literature from which this text derives.