Intergenerational transmission of conflict-related trauma in Northern Ireland: A behaviour analytic approach

Intergenerational transmission of trauma describes the impact that traumatic events experienced by one generation have for the subsequent generation. In Northern Ireland, violent conflict raged between 1969 and 1998, when a peace process begun. This study explored to what extent (if any) parents’ experiences of the conflict influenced how children perceived life in this society. Parents completed a questionnaire, and their children drew 2 pictures, depicting Northern Ireland now and before they were born. Children’s behaviors and awareness of the conflict were influenced by their parents’ experiences and narratives, their age, gender, and school. Parental narrative about the violence was influenced by individual learning history, the child’s age and gender, and present circumstances. A behavior analytic approach is offered.

Civilianizing Civil Conflict: Civilian Defense Militias and the Logic of Violence in Intra-State Conflict

This article examines how civilian defense militias shape violence during civil war. We define civilian defense forces as a sedentary and defensive form of pro-government militia that incumbents often use to harness the participation of civilians during a counterinsurgency campaign. We argue that civilian defense forces reduce the problem of insurgent identification. This leads to a reduction in state violence against civilians. However, we also claim that these actors undermine civilian support for insurgents, which leads to an increase in rebel violence against civilians and overall intensification of conflict. A statistical analysis of government and rebel violence against civilians from 1981 to 2005, and a qualitative assessment of a civilian defense force operating in Iraq from 2005 to 2009, offer strong support for our theoretical claims. These findings provide further insight into pro-government militias and their effects on violence. They also have wider ethical implications for the use of civilian collaborators during civil war.

Religious Geopolitics of Palestinian Christianity: Palestinian Christian Zionists, Palestinian Liberation Theologists, and American Missions to Palestine

The introduction of Protestantism into the Middle East by American missionaries in the nineteenth century met with limited success while the responses and internalizations of local converts proved incredibly diverse. The two resultant theological descendants are Palestinian Christian Zionists and Palestinian Liberation Theologists. The article provides a short history of these two movements and highlights influential voices through interviews and media analysis. This article argues that hybrid religious identifications with nation and place has transcended, in some cases, political struggle for territory.

Moving Out of Conflict: Negotiating Social Identity in Response to Segregation in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the impact of territoriality on young people’s everyday experiences in Northern Ireland’s segregated communities. It shows how urban encounters are reproduced through negotiating differences and the ways in which living in divided communities escalates moods of social inequality and spatial imbalances. The empirical study undertaken in the city of Derry shows how individuals and community groups position and identify themselves under the impact of social segregation. Building on Gordon Allport’s (1954) theories of contact, I explain how people in Derry have established their own sense of belonging, of who they are, based on their group memberships which eventually became an important source of pride and selfesteem. They also presented their own intertextual references as a cause of routine survival and belonging, allowing them to be more constructive about their future. Under deeply rooted segregation in Northern Ireland, the young generations are sought to provide lasting change to foster peace and integration between the two communities.

Scene From a Different Angle: Attempts to Internationalize Northern Ireland’s Conflict Experience

Reviews the books, Lessons From the Northern Ireland Peace Process edited by Timothy J. White (2013) and Human Rights as War by Other Means by Jennifer Curtis (2014). Edited by a U.S.-based academic with an enduring interest in Ireland, the first book draws together an interdisciplinary group of academics from across North America and the U.K. (though notably not Northern Ireland itself) to cover such topics as third party intervention, nationalism, grassroots change, and community development. The second text to be reviewed may be seen as a thorough analysis of this particular point: what is the role played by human rights in Northern Ireland’s peace process?

EU Cross-Border Cooperation and Conflict Transformation in the Basque and Irish Border Regions

Comparative research on violent conflict in the Basque Country and Ireland has yielded a sizable body of published academic work. Less well explored is the relationship between conflict transformation and cross-border cooperation in that specific comparative context. This paper provides a comparative examination of Third (not for profit) sector cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation in the Basque (France/Spain) and Irish (UK/Ireland) border regions. To what extent does cross-border cooperation contribute to peacebuilding in the two last violent ethnonationalist conflicts in Western Europe? The comparison is based on the premise that the EU played a different role in both cases. In the Irish case, the EU contributed to the institutionalization of a peace process that included cross-border cooperation between third sector organizations among the policy instruments contributing to conflict transformation. In the Basque case, the unilateral renunciation of violence by ETA (Euskadi eta Askatasuna) in 2010 did not generate the consistent involvement of the EU in a comparable institutional peace process. However, some third sector organizations used EU instruments for cross-border economic, social and cultural cooperation between France and Spain in order to reinforce their cross-border networks, which indirectly impacted on conflict transformation. The effectiveness of this cross-border cooperation for conflict transformation is assessed comparatively. To what extent does this increase in cross-border cooperation “from below” connect to wider institutional and social processes of conflict transformation in Ireland and the Basque Country? Crucially, does the strengthening of cross-border relations on shared issues mollify or sharpen existing identity cleavages? Also considered is the sustainability of such cooperation in these regions in light of the less favourable post-2004 EU funding environment, and the post-2008 economic and political turmoil affecting the relevant EU member states, especially Ireland and Spain.

European Union Cross-Border Cooperation as Conflict Transformation:Potential and Limits

Cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation provides a potential strategy for the European Union (EU) to help realise its founding peacebuilding objective. A wealth of cross-border cooperation activity sponsored by the EU spans a quarter of a century. Although the conflict transformation capacity of that cooperation is questionable in some border regions there is evidence to suggest that it has delivered peacebuilding dividends in other border regions. However, EU cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation faces a number of significant twenty-first century challenges including: ghost borders of the communal imagination; EU external border securitization; perceptions of EU and Russian empire-building; and the Mediterranean transmigrant/refugee crisis. It is argued that these challenges pose significant obstacles to EU cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation and undermine the peacebuilding objective of European integration.

The time course of conflict on the Cognitive Reflection Test

Reasoning that is deliberative and reflective often requires the inhibition of intuitive responses. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is designed to assess people’s ability to suppress incorrect heuristic responses in favour of deliberation. Correct responding on the CRT predicts performance on a range of tasks in which intuitive processes lead to incorrect responses, suggesting indirectly that CRT performance is related to cognitive control. Yet little is known about the cognitive processes underlying performance on the CRT. In the current research, we employed a novel mouse tracking mjavascript:void(0);ethodology to capture the time-course of reasoning on the CRT. Analysis of mouse cursor trajectories revealed that participants were initially drawn towards the incorrect (i.e., intuitive) option even when the correct (deliberative) option was ultimately chosen. Conversely, participants were not attracted to the correct option when they ultimately chose the incorrect intuitive one. We conclude that intuitive processes are activated automatically on the CRT and must be inhibited in order to respond correctly. When participants responded intuitively, there was no evidence that deliberative reasoning had become engaged.

Precarious spaces and urban change in post-conflict Belfast

The Northern Ireland conflict is shaped by an ethno-national contest between a minority Catholic/Nationalist/Republican population who broadly want to see the reunification of Ireland; and a majority Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist one, who mainly wish to maintain the sovereign connection with Britain. After nearly three decades of violence, which intensified segregation in schooling, labour markets and especially housing, a Peace Agreement was signed on Good Friday 1998. This paper is concerned with the peace process after the Agreement, not so much for the ambiguous political compromise, but for the way in which the city is constitutive of transformation and how Belfast in particular, is now embedded with a range of social instabilities and spatial contradictions. The Agreement encouraged rapid economic expansion, inward investment, especially in knowledge–intensive sectors and a short-lived optimism that markets and the neo-liberal fix would drive the post-conflict, post-industrial and post-political city. Capital would trump ethnicity and the economic uplift would bind citizens to a new expression of hope based on property speculation, tourism and global corporate investment.