Archiving Qualitative Data in the Context of a Society Coming out of Conflict: Some Lessons from Northern Ireland.

ARK (‘Access Research Knowledge’) was set up with a single goal: to make social science information on Northern Ireland available to the widest possible audience. The most well-known and widely used part of the ARK resource is CAIN (Conflict Archive on the INternet), which is one of the largest on-line collections of source material and information and about the Northern Ireland conflict. The compilation of CAIN's new Remembering: Victims, Survivors and Commemoration section raised issues related to the sensitivity of the material, as it feeds into the fundamental debate on the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict. It also fundamentally raises the question to what extent archiving is a neutral or political activity and necessitates a discourse on responsibility and ethics among social researchers. Experiences from the establishment of the Northern Ireland Qualitative Archive (NIQA) shed light on future possibilities with regard to qualitative archives on the Northern Ireland conflict.

The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630

A detailed investigation of an outlawed mystical religious fellowship in early modern England.

Reviewing the European North/South Divide under the Prism of Beck’s ‘Risk society’ Thesis

Reviewing the European North/South Divide under the Prism of Beck’s ‘Risk society’ Thesis
Southern European political cultures have been viewed as extremely disadvantageous terrains for the development of a civic culture compatible to the requirements of a modern polity. Trust confined to the local and the familial, weak civil societies, violation of the law in the absence of supervision are some of the elements combined to draw an extremely negative picture of southern European political cultures in the relevant literature. These are very well entrenched perceptions that dominate all studies dealing with social aspects the southern European nations. Recent works produced by students of environmental mobilisations have argued that the environmental problematique has operated as a catalyst that, at least, forces us to re-examine the aforementioned perspectives if not to outright dismiss them.

This paper argues that although these challenging perspectives are not immune from criticisms, they have put forward a strong case that deserves further attention. A careful reading of Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis suggests that mistrust to expert authorities and defensive reactions by social actors against them are not confined to specific national contexts but are now characteristics of countries previously held to be exemplary cases of civicness. Following that observation the paper proceeds by posing a number of related questions:

1) Can we argue that we are witnessing a general ‘Mediterranisation’ of European political culture or by arguing that we essentially accept what was idealistic evaluations of post-war European cultures determined by specific political conceptions?

2) Is there still any role for the use of a north/south divide in the cross-national study of social processes and to what extent?

Civil society versus nationalizing state?:Advocacy of minority rights in the post-socialist Baltic states

Strong civil society provides individuals with arenas to bring their interests to the attention of policymakers. In so doing, civil society organizations (CSOs) can support state policies, but can also criticize policies. This paper argues that most minority rights advocacy CSOs in the Baltic states have little say in the crafting of policy and are compartmentalized into the existing agendas, with only a few groups able to evaluate policies independently. It concludes that the Baltic civil society is weak because the CSOs working on minority issues ask policymakers either too much, or too little. The findings suggest that policymakers quell criticism of their work from the side of the CSOs by ignoring their activities. Alternatively, by funding the CSO that shores up the state agenda, policymakers delegate their responsibilities to civic actors, keep critical voices from public debates and claim that their policies have the full support of a vibrant civil society. This paper investigates the options available for civil society actors to relate to policymakers in a nationalizing state by drawing on the data collected in 77 semi-structured interviews with the CSOs working with Russian and Polish minorities in the Baltic states between 2006 and 2009. © 2011 Association for the Study of Nationalities.