The Promise of Peace:Revisiting the Northern Irish Model

The Northern Ireland peace process is often eulogized as a successful model of conflict transformation. Although the process exhibited many of the problems that beset other societies seeking to move from conflict to a negotiated peace (including disagreements over the functioning of institutions and the meanings of cultural symbols, unresolved issues relating to the effects of political violence on victims and survivors and society at large; and the residual presence of violent and political ‘spoiler’ groups), the resilience of political dialogue has proven remarkable.
This collection revisits the promise of ‘a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning’ a decade and a half on from the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The book will bring together academics from across a number of disciplines, including management and organizational behaviour, law, politics, sociology, archaeology and literature.

The different contributions aim to assess what impact it has made in the legal, policy, and institutional areas it specifically targeted: political reform, human rights and equality provision, working through legacies of the past (including police reform, prisoner release and victims' rights) and the building of new relationships within the island of Ireland and between Ireland and Britain. With the emergence of first-time voters who had no direct experience of the violence the book explores what the Agreement offers for future generations.

The book is the culmination of a 12-month research project sponsored by the British Academy and Leverhulme that addressed the following aspects of the peace process:
Peace walls: The euphemistically named peace walls remain one of the most visible reminders of Northern Ireland’s divisions and they are famously the only material manifestations of the conflict that have grown in number and extent since the 1998 Agreement. They were originally placed between antagonistic neighbouring communities – often at their request – at times of heightened tensions. Research under this theme explored the lack of ongoing engagement with their continuing presences, evolving meanings and impact on the communities that reside beside them needs to be overtly addressed.
Cultural division: Cultural differences have often been seen as lying at the heart of the ‘Irish problem’. Despite this, art and artists have increasingly been seen as having the potential to develop new discourses. Research explored the following questions: What role can the arts play in re-imagining the spaces opened up by the promises of the 1998 Agreement? What implication does the confrontation with the legacies of conflict have for artistic practices? What impact do the arts have on constructions of identity, on narratives of history, and on electoral politics?
Institutional transformation: This strand of research explored the significance of the process of organizational change which followed the establishment of the 1998 on political and other public policy institutions such as the police and prison services. It suggested that the experience and lessons learned from such periods of transition have much to contribute to how Northern Ireland begins to address political polarization in other areas of public service infrastructure, chiefly around the sectarian monoliths of education and housing.
Working through the past: ‘Legacy’ issues have gained increasing prominence since 1998: issues to do with public symbolism (particularly relating to the flying of flags and parading), defining victimhood, securing victims’ rights, recovery of the ‘disappeared’, reintegrating ex- prisoners back into society, and the possibilities for truth recovery and reconciliation have all acquired salient and emotive force. Although the 1998 Agreement promised to ‘honour the dead’ through a ‘new beginning’, it is increasingly unclear as to whether an agreed narrative about the past is possible – or even worthwhile pursuing. Research under this theme looked at the complex relationship between memory, commemoration and violence; how commemorative events are performed, organized, policed and represented. It also addressed the fraught issue of how to come to terms with Northern Ireland’s divided and bloodied past.

The editors are in the process of guiding contributors to adapt their papers, which were presented to a series of workshops on the above themes, to the purposes of the book. In particular, the contributors will be guided to focus on the related aims of assessing the extent of change that has occurred and providing an assessment of what remains to be done. To that end, contributors are asked to engage directly with the questions that close the ‘Introduction’, namely: To what extent has the ‘promise’ of the 1998 Agreement been fulfilled? To what extent has the 1998 Agreement given rise to forms of exclusion? To what extent has the 1998 Agreement shaped new forms of debate, dispute and engagement? In the absence of that guidance having been sent out yet, the outlines below are, for the time being, the abstracts of their original papers.

The Church of the Abandoned Christ: David Peace's 'Red Riding Quartet' and the Wreck of the White Ship

David Peace’s novel Nineteen Seventy-seven concludes with the hack journalist Jack Whitehead being granted a terrifying apocalyptic vision, seconds before he is trepanned with a Phillips screwdriver by the sinister Reverend Martin Laws. Included in this vision is a curious reference to the wreck of the White Ship, a maritime disaster in 1120 that drowned William Atheling, heir to the English throne, and ultimately doomed England to years of civil war. This article explores Peace’s strange use of the shipwreck in his “Red Riding Quartet,” particularly the way he links it—in the quartet’s final volume, Nineteen Eighty Three—to a revisionist account of the aftermath of the crucifixion that leads a wounded Christ to a tragic death in the cold waters of the English Channel.

Embracing difference and the deferral of self-government: a critical analysis of the framing and practice of contemporary peace building

This thesis analyses how dominant policy approaches to peacebuilding have moved away from a single and universalised understanding of peace to be achieved through a top-down strategy of democratisation and economic liberalisation, prevalent at the beginning of 1990s. Instead, throughout the 2000s, peacebuilders have increasingly adopted a commitment to cultivating a bottom-up and hybrid peace building process that is context-sensitive and intended to be more respectful of the needs and values of post-war societies. The projects of statebuilding in Kosovo and, to a lesser extent, in Bosnia are examined to illustrate the shift. By capturing this shift, I seek to argue that contemporary practitioners of peace are sharing the sensibility of the theoretical critics of liberalism. These critics have long contended that post-war societies cannot be governed from ‘above’ and have advocated the adoption of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding. Now, both peace practitioners and their critics share the tendency to embrace difference in peacebuilding operations, but this shift has failed to address meaningfully the problems and concerns of post-conflict societies. The conclusion of this research is that, drawing on the assumption that these societies are not capable of undertaking sovereign acts because of their problematic inter-subjective frames, the discourses of peacebuilding (in policy-making and academic critique) have increasingly legitimised an open-ended role of interference by external agencies, which now operate from ‘below’. Peacebuilding has turned into a long-term process, in which international and local actors engage relationally in the search for ever-more emancipatory hybrid outcomes, but in which self-government and self-determination are constantly deferred. Processes of emphasising difference have thus denied the political autonomy of post-war societies and have continuously questioned the political and human equality of these populations in a hierarchically divided world.

History of England from the peace of Utrecht to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Edition 3,Volume 2 / by lord Mahon

Collection : Collection of ancient and modern british authors ; 325-326

History of England from the peace of Utrecht to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Volume 1,Edition 3 / by lord Mahon

Collection : Collection of ancient and modern british authors ; 325-326

Letter from the Secretary of War, transmitting documents containing the information required by the resolution of Mr. Wright, on the 22d inst. relative to the execution of the act fixing the military peace establishment. --

14th Congress, 1st session, 1815-1816. House. Document no. 33.

Message from the President of the United States, transmitting communications from the plenipotentiaries of the United States charged with negotiating peace with Great Britain : showing the conditions on which alone that government is willing to put an end to the war. --

13th Congress, 3d session. House. Doc. 6.

Message from the President of the United States, transmitting copies of the instructions given to the ministers of the United States appointed to negotiate a peace with Great Britain. --

13th Congress, 3d session. House. Doc. no. 8.

Letter from the Secretary of War, transmitting documents containing the information required by the resolution of Mr. Wright, on the 22d inst. relative to the execution of the act fixing the military peace establishment

14th Congress, 1st session, 1815-1816. House. Document no. 33. January 27, 1816. Read and referred to the Committee on Military Affairs.

Message from the President of the United States, transmitting communications from the plenipotentiaries of the United States charged with negotiating peace with Great Britain

Full Title: Message from the President of the United States, transmitting communications from the plenipotentiaries of the United States charged with negotiating peace with Great Britain : showing the conditions on which alone that government is willing to put an end to the war 13th Congress, 3d session. House. Doc. 6. October 10, 1814. Referred to the Committee of Foreign Relations. Printed by Roger C. Weightman

Message from the President of the United States, transmitting copies of the instructions given to the ministers of the United States appointed to negotiate a peace with Great Britain

13th Congress, 3d session. House. Doc. no. 8. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- October 14, 1814. Read and referred to the Committee of Foreign Relations. Printed by Roger C. Weightman

The mexican war : a history of its origen, and a detailed account of the victories wich terminated in the surrender of the capital ; with the official despatches of the generals. To which is added, the Treaty of Peace, and valuable tables of the strength and losses of the United States Army.

UANL

Battles of Mexico : Containing an authentic account of all the Battles fought in that Republic : including the treaty of peace : with list of the killed and wounded, toger with a Brief Sketch of the Lives of Generals Scott and Taylor.

UANL

The history of modern Europe: with a view of the progress of society from the rise of the modern kingdom to the peace of Paris, in 1763

UANL