Difference, Diversity and Difficulty: Problems in Adult Peace Education in Northern Ireland

The peace process in Northern Ireland has been hailed, variously, as the successful resolution to one of the world's most intractable conflicts, and as a failed attempt to reconcile the conflciting claims of the two main ethnonationalist communities. At both these points, and at every other point along the continuum, recognition is given to the centrality of education. This article looks at the role played by adult learning, and contrasts two fundamentally different apporaoches. In one, Enlightenment assumptions about the power of knowledge to dispel prejudice have run alongside attempts to create a world of shared values; in the other, a postmodern acceptance of different cultures has accompnaied a peace process that builds upon ethnic diistinctions. As with the Dayton Accord and with other peace agreements brokered with international assistance, the consociational model of governance has been chosen for Northern Ireland in order to create a political equilibrium between the unionists and nationalists. Such a political framework reverses the direction of previous integrationist educational policies in favour of a celebration of difference, an approach that is fraught with difficulties.

Courts and Consociations: Human Rights versus Power-sharing

Consociations are power-sharing arrangements, increasingly used to manage ethno-nationalist, ethno-linguistic, and ethno-religious conflicts. Current examples include Belgium, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Burundi, and Iraq. Despite their growing popularity, they have begun to be challenged before human rights courts as being incompatible with human rights norms, particularly equality and non-discrimination.

Courts and Consociations examines the use of power-sharing agreements, their legitimacy, and their compatibility with human rights law. Key questions include to what extent, if any, consociations conflict with the liberal individualist preferences of international human rights institutions, and to what extent consociational power-sharing may be justified to preserve peace and the integrity of political settlements.

In three critical cases, the European Court of Human Rights has considered equality challenges to important consociational practices, twice in Belgium and then in Sejdic and Finci v Bosnia regarding the constitution established for Bosnia Herzegovina under the Dayton Agreement. The Court's decision in Sejdic and Finci has significantly altered the approach it previously took to judicial review of consociational arrangements in Belgium. This book accounts for this change and assess its implications. The problematic aspects of the current state of law are demonstrated. Future negotiators in places riven by potential or actual bloody ethnic conflicts may now have less flexibility in reaching a workable settlement, which may unintentionally contribute to sustaining such conflicts and make it more likely that negotiators will consider excluding regional and international courts from reviewing these political settlements.

Considering Just-World Thinking in Counter-Terrorism Cases: Miscarriages of Justice in Northern Ireland

Recent literature has drawn a parallel between the discriminatory application of counterterrorism legislation to the Irish population in the United Kingdom during the Northern Ireland conflict and the targeting of Muslims after September 2001. Less attention has been paid to lessons that can be drawn from judicial decision making in terrorism-related cases stemming from the Northern Ireland conflict. This Article examines Northern Ireland Court of Appeal (“NICA”) jurisprudence on miscarriages of justice in cases regarding counterterrorism offenses. In particular, the Article focuses on cases referred after the 1998 peace agreements in Northern Ireland from the Criminal Cases Review Commission (“CCRC”), a relatively new entity that investigates potential wrongful convictions in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Although the NICA’s human rights jurisprudence has developed significantly in recent years, the study of CCRC-referred cases finds that judges have retained confidence in the integrity of the conflict-era counterterrorism system even while acknowledging abuses and procedural irregularities that occurred. This study partially contradicts contentions that judicial deference to the executive recedes in a post-conflict or post-emergency period. Despite a high rate of quashed convictions, the NICA’s decisions suggest that it seeks to limit a large number of referrals and demonstrate a judicial predisposition to defend the justness of the past system’s laws and procedure. This perspective is consistent with what social psychologists have studied as “just-world thinking,” in which objective observers, although motivated by a concern with justice, believe—as a result of cognitive bias—that individuals “got what they deserved.” The Article considers other potential interpretations of the jurisprudence and contends that conservative decision making is particularly dangerous in the politicized realm of counterterrorism and in light of the criminalization of members of suspect communities.

Law's Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts: Essays in Honour of William Twining

Law's Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts examines William Twining's principal contributions to law and jurisprudence in the context of three issues which will receive significant scholarly attention over the coming decades. Part I explores human rights, including torture, the role of evidence in human rights cases, the emerging discourse on 'traditional values', the relevance of 'Southern voices' to human rights debates, and the relationship between human rights and peace agreements. Part II assesses the impact of globalization through the lenses of sociology and comparative constitutionalism, and features an analysis of the development of pluralistic ideas of law in the context of privatization. Finally, Part III addresses issues of legal theory, including whether global legal pluralism needs a concept of law, the importance of context in legal interpretation, the effect of increasing digitalization on legal theory, and the utility of feminist and postmodern approaches to globalization and legal theory.

The first major step in the peace process’? Exploring the impact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement on Irish republican thinking

This article supports interpretations of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 as a significant factor contributing towards the development of the Northern Ireland peace process. However, it also emphasises a certain serendipity in the Agreement’s effect on northern nationalist, and more specifically republican, politics in the region. In particular, it stresses that a specific interpretation of the Agreement promoted by the SDLP inspired a dialogue with republicanism, encouraging an ongoing re-appraisal within the latter about the nature of Britain’s role in Northern Ireland. This, the article argues, reinforced the movement towards a more political approach that republicans had begun in the 1980s, and encouraged their eventual embrace of a constitutional strategy in the 1990s. However, in advancing this argument, the article notes that such an outcome was far from the minds of the British and Irish officials who negotiated the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The Agreement was intended to marginalise rather than accommodate republicans. Despite this, it provided an inadvertent incentive to draw militant republicanism into the democratic process in Northern Ireland.