Long-Term Imprisonment in Northern Ireland:Psychological or Political Survival?

The chapter reviews the literature on the affects of long-term imprisonment with a focus on concepts of psychological survival, learned helplessness and institutionalization. It then discusses trends in imprisonment in Northern Ireland and the exceptionally high proportion of prisoners serving life sentences. Through interviews with prisoners and their relatives, a critique of the literature is made in terms of the failure to take account of cases of collective prisoner organization and strong political motivation.

Economic Ideas and the Political Construction of the Financial Crash of 2008

This article is a short introduction to a special section on economic ideas and the political construction of the financial crash. It begins by explaining why economic ideas and the politics of appeals to certain ideas are so integral to the historical significance of the crash of 2008 and the question of whether it can be considered a crash at all. The first section covers the literature on ideas and economic crisis. The second section highlights that the contribution of the special section is to engage in a stock taking exercise of the empirical and conceptual patterns concerning the politics of ideational change underway in the areas of: comparative fiscal policy; monetary policy and Euro zone debt management; capital controls; and financial and securities market regulation and standard setting. The final section outlines the structure of this special section and content of the individual articles.

Childhood, Rights and Justice in Northern Ireland

Building on primary research and previous publications (Haydon, 2012; Haydon, 2014; Haydon and Scraton, 2008; McAlister, Scraton and Haydon, 2009; Scraton and Haydon, 2002), this chapter will provide a critical analysis of children’s rights and youth justice in Northern Ireland. More broadly, it will consider recent research concerning the criminalisation of children and young people in the United Kingdom and profound concerns regarding the policing and regulation of children raised in successive concluding observations about the UK Government’s implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 1995, 2002, 2008). From this generic context, the chapter will map the ‘particular circumstances’ of Northern Ireland - a discrete legal jurisdiction to which powers for justice and policing were devolved only in 2010. Emerging from four decades of conflict and progressing through an uneasy ‘peace’, rights-based institutions and enabling legislation have, in principle, promoted and protected human rights. Yet children and young people living in communities marginalised by poverty and the legacy of conflict continue to experience inconsistent formal regulation by the police and the criminal justice system, while enduring often brutal informal regulation by paramilitaries. The chapter will explore evident tensions between the dynamics of criminalisation and promotion/ protection of children’s rights in a society transitioning from conflict. Further, it will analyse the challenges to securing children’s rights principles and provisions within a hostile political and ideological context, arguing for a critical rights-based agenda that promotes social justice through rights compliance together with policies and practices that address the structural inequalities faced by children and young people.

Raymond Geuss’ radicalization of realism in political theory

Raymond Geuss has been viewed as one of the figureheads of the recent debates about realism in political theory. This interpretation, however, depends on a truncated understanding of his work of the past 30 years. I will offer the first sustained engagement with this work (in English and German) which allows understanding his realism as a project for reorienting political theory, particularly the relationship between political theory and politics. I interpret this reorientation as a radicalization of realismin political theory through the combination of the emphasis on the critical purpose of political theory and the provision of practical, contextual orientation. Their compatibility depends on Geuss’ understanding of criticism as negative, of power as ‘detoxified’ and of the critical purchase of political theory as based on the diagnostic engagement with its context. This radicalization particularly challenges the understanding of how political theory relates to its political context.