Mainstream politics in Northern Ireland has not been welcoming to women, but many women have been present in community and voluntary organizations where their contribution has been outstanding. This book examines four organizations (including the recently-formed Northern Ireland Women's Coalition) where women have been active. It discusses the processes and structures created by these groups in order to work democratically across differences and argues that their experiences are invaluable to the development of feminist debates on democracy and difference.
This book explores the relationship between women, the state and democratic politics in Ireland today. It highlights the conservatism of the political culture shared by all traditions on the island, and how this culture circumscribes women’s political agency in Northern Ireland and Ireland. The book explores the opportunities and obstacles to women’s participation and representation on each side of the border. The chapters take the view that public decision-making institutions and processes are subject to rules and practices that reinforce the gendered foundations of democratic politics. They document women’s continuing quest for full participation and equal representation in these male-gendered arenas. The contributors focus on the marginalised experiences of women in modern politics in Ireland and detail their efforts to challenge the masculinized status quo. The book addresses the classical issues of citizenship, participation, representation and equal rights in a sustained analysis of the political systems on the island. It also deals with modern issues – multiculturalism, peace-building, the male-gendered legislature and the unequal nature of women’s citizenship in constitutional, institutional and policy contexts. The book is completed by a comprehensive appendix of all women elected to political office on the island from 1918-2013. This book was published as a special issue of Irish Political Studies.
The articles in this special issue, drawn from a workshop hosted by the Institute of Governance, Queen’s University, Belfast, explicitly engage with and challenge conventional academic analyses in order to confront the ways in which the conflict on Northern Ireland has traditionally been represented and understood. Part of the reason for adopting this approach is because it is suggested that to a certain extent, academic analyses have defined the parameters of the conflict which has necessarily had implications for the shape of ensuing solutions. A further claim is that the persistent historical and political search for causes and solutions may be constitutive of the problems that conventional analysts seek to resolve. The articles in the first part introduce and problematize traditional analyses of the conflict. Additionally, these essays explain alternative approaches offering other ways of thinking about how the ‘problem’ of Northern Ireland has been constituted. The second part comprises empirically focused essays, each either engaging with or confronting the issue of the liberal hegemony that defines most analyses of the conflict. The final essay returns to more explicitly re-consider how the ‘problem’ of Northern Ireland has been theorized, represented and understood. This book was previously published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
The Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project inaugurates a fresh dialogue on gender, legal judgment, judicial power and national identity in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Through a process of judicial re-imagining, the project takes account of the peculiarly Northern/Irish concerns in shaping gender through judicial practice. This collection, following on from feminist judgments projects in Canada, England and Australia takes the feminist judging methodology in challenging new directions. This book collects 26 rewritten judgments, covering a range of substantive areas. As well as opinions from appellate courts, the book includes fi rst instance decisions and a fi ctional review of a Tribunal of Inquiry. Each feminist judgment is accompanied by a commentary putting the case in its social context and explaining the original decision. The book also includes introductory chapters examining the project methodology, constructions of national identity, theoretical and conceptual issues pertaining to feminist judging, and the legal context of both jurisdictions. The book, shines a light on past and future possibilities - and limitations - for judgment on the island of Ireland. 'This book provides a rich and expansive addition to the feminist judgments catalogue. The ... judgments demonstrate powerfully how Northern/Irish judges have contributed to the gendered politics of national identity, and how the narrow subject-positions they have created for women and 'others' could have been so much wider and more open.' Professor Rosemary Hunter, School of Law, Queen Mary University London. 'The Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project is inspirational reading for anyone interested in feminism or Irish studies ... It is a model of how to conduct feminist enquiry. Its most innovative contribution to scholarship and politics is how the rewriting of landmark legal judgments from a feminist perspective allows us to imagine (and therefore begin to construct) a more egalitarian, a more just, future.' Associate Professor Katherine O'Donnell, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin. If you let it, this book will make you think. ... It made me think – it reminded me, I suppose – that legal writing can be wonderful: rigorous, creative, deeply observant, provocative. Read it and see what it makes you think. Professor Thérèse Murphy, School of Law, Queen's University Belfast
The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998. This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.
What role do transitional justice processes play in determining the gender outcomes of transitions from conflict and authoritarianism? What is the impact of transitional justice processes on the human rights of women in states emerging from political violence? Gender Politics in Transitional Justice argues that human rights outcomes for women are determined in the space between international law and local gender politics. The book draws on feminist political science to reveal the key gender dynamics that shape the strategies of local women’s movements in their engagement with transitional justice, and the ultimate success of those strategies, termed ‘the local fit’. Also drawing on feminist doctrinal scholarship in international law, ‘the international frame’ examines the role of international law in defining harms against women in transitional justice and in determining the ‘from’ and ‘to’ of transitions from conflict and authoritarianism. This book locates evolving state practice in gender and transitional justice over the past two decades within the context of the enhanced protection of women’s human rights under international law. Relying on original empirical and legal research in Chile, Northern Ireland and Colombia, the book speaks more broadly to the study of gender politics and international law in transitional justice.
This volume examines the critical factors and processes by which the Provisional Irish Republican movement campaign from 1969 to 1998 transformed a once acquiescent nationalist population in Northern Ireland into a counterpublic of resistance demanding national self-determination and social justice. Considering the establishment of Irish Republican community institutions, prison protests, Republican Feminism, and Provisional IRA media and communications, this volume explores the emergence of Republicanism as a mass social movement in the nationalist Catholic ghettos and rural regions of Northern Ireland in the 1970s – a development that helped to sustain the armed struggle of the Provisional Irish Republican Army for three decades. An examination of the emergence and transformative power of the counterpublic discourse and action of the Irish Republican movement, this volume provides a framework for conceptualizing counterpublics in social movement studies. As such it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, and politics with interests in social movements and mobilization.
Democracy and Northern Ireland examines the influence of liberal theories of democracy on recent developments in the Northern Irish peace process. In so doing it analyzes the applicability of theories such as political liberalism, multiculturalism and deliberative democracy to deeply divided societies. Little contends that these models need to build upon recent critiques provided by feminists and civil society theorists in the construction of a more radical interpretation of democracy that can provide a framework for democratic politics in Northern Ireland.
The conflict in Northern Ireland since 1969 has cost over 3,600 lives and about 100,000 people in Northern Ireland live in a household where someone has been injured in a troubles-related incident. This has been a key issue in British and Irish politics and the recent peace process in Northern Ireland and the current ‘War on Terrorism’ has stimulated international involvement and a desire to ‘learn the lessons’ of ‘the troubles’. Although Northern Ireland has a population of just 1.5 million people it is one of the most researched territories of the world. There is considerable controversy over the interpretation of the history of Northern Ireland, not least since 1969. This new addition to the Seminar Studies in History Series provides a comprehensive introduction to the difficult topic, reviewing different perspectives on the recent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland while at the same time providing an authoritative overview. Each book in the Seminar Studies in History series provides a concise and reliable introduction to complex events and debates. Written by acknowledged experts and supported by extracts from historical Documents, a Chronology, Glossary, Who’s Who of key figures and Guide to Further Reading, Seminar Studies in History are the essential guides to understanding a topic.
The first book-length treatment of the political representation of women in countries with parliamentary systems based on the Westminster model. Written by a major international team of authors, this new study features twelve chapters on both new and established parliaments, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It tests the latest theories about women's political representation within Westminster style assemblies and is organized into three key sections that: examine the extent to which the descriptive representation of women in the ‘old’ Westminster parliaments has progressed in recent years, and the factors which have enhanced or impeded development. explore the relationship between the numbers of women elected and the substantive representation of women – or the extent that women ‘act for’ women. review the recent experiences of four ‘new’ Westminster parliaments (Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Nunavut) and evaluate the political opportunities for women provided by the creation of new institutions. This new comparative study will be of great interest to students and researchers of legislative studies and of gender politics and gender studies.
