From Conflict to Peace?:The Rights Abuses of Women and Girls in Northern Ireland

This article is based on primary research conducted by the authors in Northern Ireland in Mourne House women’s unit at Maghaberry Prison in 2004 and in Ash House women’s prison unit in Hydebank Wood Young Offender Centre from 2005-2006. It explores the imprisonment of women in prison in the context of a society slowly and unevenly emerging from violent conflict and against a backdrop of the global rise of women’s imprisonment over the past two decades. The history of the gendered punishment of politically motivated prisoners is explored, followed by discussion of the findings of primary research in Mourne House women’s unit and, following its closure, in Ash House. The conclusion analyses how women’s prison experiences in the North contribute to an understanding of the contested terrain of agency and resistance. Finally, the article explores the potential for, and barriers, to change within women’s imprisonment in Northern Ireland.

Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual Arts:Cities of Memory

This book examines how contemporary theatre, performance, film and the visual arts respond to the post-conflict condition. The contents of the volume focus on a range of post-conflict cities, encouraging interdisciplinary discussion on the role of the arts and its relation to issues of testimony, witnessing, forgetting, representation, healing, reconciliation, agency, and metaphor. Contributors include: Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Taylor, Marvin Carlson, Rob Stone, Laurel Borisenko, Katarzyna Puzon, Miriam Paeslack, Emma Grey, Paula Blair, Zoran Poposki, Marija Todorova, Elena Carduro, and Paul Devlin.

Electoral Systems, Ethnic Cleavages, and Experience with Democracy

Recent studies show the effects of electoral systems and ethnic cleavages on the number of parties in emerging democracies differ from those effects observed in more established democracies. Building on recent arguments maintaining the quality of democracy improves with experience, we argue the reason for the differences in the findings between established and emerging democracies is that the effects of these variables on the number of parties differ according to a country’s experience with elections. To test this argument, we analyse party system fragmentation in 89 established and emerging democracies and the conditioning effects experience with elections have on the effects of district magnitude, ethnic cleavages, and variables relating to the presidential party system. The results show the effects of institutional and social cleavage variables differ substantially between emerging and established democracies, but these effects begin to approximate those seen in more established democracies with additional experience with elections.

Potentially Voting across the Divide in Deeply Divided Places: Ethnic Catch-All Voting in Consociational Northern Ireland

I elaborate a model of cross-bloc party support in deeply divided places. The model expects that the variation in the level of electoral support that citizens in Community A have for parties in Community B is a function of citizens' evaluations of the relative ability of parties in Community B to represent the interests of all communities. This 'ethnic catch-all' model of cross-bloc party support is tested in the context of consociational Northern Ireland, using data from a representative survey conducted directly after the 2010 Westminster general election. The findings are asymmetric: the model explains Protestant support for nationalist parties but not Catholic support for unionist parties. The findings, and their implications, are discussed.

Financial reintegration assistance for veterans of the Irish revolution (1916-23): post-conflict policy in an historical setting

In the aftermath of the Irish revolution and Civil War the governments of independent Ireland introduced various compensation schemes to provide financial reintegration assistance to revolutionary veterans. This would be recognised today as part of a programme for DDR. This paper will examine various service and disability pensions paid to veterans in the context of literature on post-conflict reintegration. It will examine various challenges to reintegration in an effort to analyse the success of revolutionary compensation as a post-conflict reintegration mechanism in independent Ireland after 1922.

Ethnic Segregation, Moral Panics and Social Class: A Comparative Study of the Experiences and Perspectives of Working Class and Middle Class Children in Belfast

This paper begins by describing the moral panics that have tended to emerge sporadically in Northern Ireland over the last few years with regard to young people’s involvement in sectarian violence in Belfast. Within this, while these young people have been cast in the traditional role of folk devils, the paper will show how younger children also tend to be explicitly identified and named in an ambiguous way through such moral panics; playing a deviant role as participators, and sometimes instigators, of sectarian violence but also carrying the symbolic responsibility of representing Belfast’s future. It will be shown that it is because of this ambiguous position that it is adults rather than the children themselves that tend to be held responsible for their actions; either as rioters using the children as political pawns or as parents guilty of neglect. With this as a starting point the paper then explores the perspectives and experiences of two groups of 10-11 year old children living in Belfast and the impact of these moral panics on them. One group of children, living in affluent middle class areas were found to be appropriating and re-working these broader moral panics into more general discourses of derision that tended to pathologize working class children and communities more generally. For the other group of children, living in economically deprived areas with high levels of sectarian tensions and violence, their experiences of such violence and their participation in it are discussed. It will be shown that for these children, the broader moral panics that exist tend to have the effect of reinforcing the processes that tend to segregate and exclude them.