John Cash

Ideology and Affect: The Case of Northern Ireland

Ideologies are central to the organization of political life and political conflict, yet most empirical studies tend to obscure their significance. This article draws upon both social theory and psychoanalytic theory in an attempt to overcome such lacunae in the study of ideology and politics. It focuses upon Unionist ideology in Northern Ireland and attempts to establish the internal diversity of this ideology by specifying its core rules for the construction of three major ideological positions

The political/cultural unconscious and the process of reconciliation

In this article I draw upon both social theory and psychoanalytic theory to develop an analysis of the dynamics and dilemmas of the political project of reconciliation, paying some attention to the case of Australia. Reconciliation has come to figure as a central motive and motif of a postcolonial moment that is engaged in an attempt at re-organising social relations in ‘settler’ societies such as Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Australia. In Northern Ireland the contested, fraught and yet somewhat concerted attempt to re-organise social and political relations, in order to displace a politics of hatred and violence organised through categories of ethnic identity, has been played out, as it were simultaneously, at both the level of the state institutions and within civil society. In Australia a remarkably stable set of political institutions has been slowly and falteringly prodded and shamed into addressing its foundational blind-spot; that which it refused to see while all the while becoming fixated on the sight of its absence. Such was the doctrine of terra nullius that declared Australia to be unoccupied by the human beings who inhabited its diverse lands and climates. Nomadic patterns of occupation became evidence for no real occupation at all. This total eclipse of reason (of capacities for reasoning and reasonableness) could only be supported by a perverse reason of law, the law of terra nullius. While explicitly rejected as legal doctrine in recent times, the fantasy of terra nullius persists at the core of Australian nationalism and continues to organise the relations between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens within the discourse and practices of the nation. This fantasy constitutes a core element of what I am terming the political/cultural unconscious. It condenses into a repressed primal scene of conquest, violence and appropriation a specific mode of thinking, feeling and relating that eclipses the claims to recognition of the indigenous other. This exclusivist mode, with its repertoire of culturally specific othering mechanisms, has encoded itself into the narratives of white settlement and nation-building and continues to disfigure and distort settler–indigenous relations, even in the contemporary period marked by multiculturalism and a contested social project of reconciliation. The first part of my argument involves a radical critique of those approaches to reconciliation that construe significant change as a change that proceeds at the level of the individual subject. Such approaches generally rely on some version of a socialisation or re-socialisation process as the key transformation that is necessary for successful reconciliation. Reconciliation is understood as a psycho-

The dilemmas of political transformation in Northern Ireland1

Since its inception in the 1920s, Northern Ireland has been, formally, a part of the much‐celebrated civic culture of the United Kingdom. It has always constituted the other side of that civic culture, the blindspot that has since come to light. Democracy has persistently met its nemesis in the political culture of Northern Ireland. However, over the past few years Northern Ireland has crept awkwardly, and often perilously, towards new political arrangements. Two recent milestones along this troubled path are the signing of the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday of 1998 and the popular approval of the referenda on new political arrangements, in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, in late May 1998. In Northern Ireland the referendum measuring popular approval of the Good Friday Agreement was supported by 71 per cent of the Northern Irish population and by approximately 50 per cent of the Unionist community.

Postcolonial bordering and ontological insecurities

This special issue takes as its point of departure the historical trajectories of modernity and globalisation, as they have impacted on colonial and postcolonial pasts and on the postcolonial present and its potential futures. In particular, it is focused on the emerging ontological insecurities that are manifest in the (re)bordering of identities, cultures, communities and states. These ontological insecurities are spurred by global processes of free trade and augmented capital flows as well as by new technologies of communication, information and travel and not least by current crises and political uncertainties at all levels of analysis. Of importance is how such emerging ontological insecurities can be understood in terms of social and political change, dislocation, hybridity and impermanence and how they typically generate a search for ontological security and stability that affects contemporary political identities in one way or another. Here we highlight not only the securitising aspects of identity stability but also the opening up of these processes in terms of refusing or resisting contemporary narratives of closure and essentialisation. Hence, the special issue deals with critical aspects of bordering, territory and the rewriting of the state in postcolonial terms. It also takes seriously the psychic and cultural processes through which identities are organised, reiterated and/or reorganised. The articles in this special issue cover a broad range of sites and concerns regarding ontological security and postcolonial bordering. These include the relationship between human security and ontological security and the role of postcolonial Sikh identities; violent cartographies of ontological insecurities in postcolonial Russia and Ukraine; the performance of citizenship rituals in postcolonial Canada; the interplay between postcolonial expressions of religious social formations in response to ontological insecurities in postcolonial South Asia; the Green Line in Cyprus as a circulating symbol of ontological insecurity; the practice of drone warfare and the re-inscription of specific power relations of ontological insecurity in postcolonial Pakistan, and finally; the dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland.

The dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Since the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has made significant progress towards a postcolonising transformation of its political culture and its major political and social institutions, as it has shifted away from violence and the dominance of political ideologies structured by the friend–enemy distinction. These ideological formations and the practices of social and political antagonism that they prescribed have been challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations that construct identities and relations through more inclusive norms of recognition and that support a more complex emotional constellation. However, as this cultural transformation has been neither thoroughgoing nor universal, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland.

Editorial: Others as Strangers

One of the ways in which Critical Horizons was first conceived was to provide a forum in which debates between protagonists with diverse views might occur across a range of intellectual and political positions. This issue of Critical Horizons can be imagined as a critical roundtable discussion that brings together a number of diverse essays that seek to conceptualise Ôthe otherÕ from various positions which draw on recent continental philosophy, critical and postcolonial theories.