John Doyle

Peacebuilding and International Responsibility

This article expands the conceptual and empirical understanding of relational responsibility in peacebuilding, by unpicking the often ill-defined notion of responsibility into three discrete and hierarchical categories – attributability, answerability and accountability. Present practices of international responsibility for their executive powers in peacebuilding missions are more affiliated with attributability and answerability than accountability. In order to substantiate and elaborate empirically this differentiated account of responsibility, the article explores the UN and EU responsibility mechanisms in Kosovo, focusing on their institutional design, effectiveness and results, as well as highlighting practical limitations and problems. A more specific conceptualization of these practices, allows a clearer analysis of the aims and limitations of the mechanisms in place.

Developments in European political science journal and electronic literature during 1997

One of the most effective mechanisms for obtaining an overview of the general direction of political science in a particular country is an examination of the output of its journal literature. This article lists the contents of the 1996 issues of selected European political science journals from a range of European countries (normally, those published by national political science associations) and comments on their content. Recent developments in three types of publishing on the world wide web are also reviewed and the relevant addresses are supplied. First, print journals increasingly maintain a minimal presence on the web, but in certain cases this extends a good deal further, to include abstracts or even the full texts of selected articles and links to related resources. Second, European governments are now all represented on the web in one form or another, though they vary greatly in terms of the range of governmental institutions covered and in the volume of documentation available. Third, the huge increase in political coverage on the web makes the indexing of this material all the more important, and we offer a listing of the major guides to national political science resources.

Workers and outlaws: Unionism and fair employment in Northern Ireland

Abstract This paper considers unionists’ perspective on fair employment. The most central aspect of the unionist position involves, paradoxically, the simultaneous denial of discrimination against nationalists and justification of their exclusion from employment. It is only through setting the unionist perspective in the context of nationalist rejection of the state that it can be seen as consistent. Unionisms position puts those who refuse to accept the legitimacy of the state into the category of outlaw. As outlaws they are beyond the protection of the law and without citizenship rights, and citizens are therefore entitled to exclude them. This is not, in unionists’ eyes, discrimination but the logical outcome of nationalists’ rejection of the polity. As the debate on fair employment is often rightly seen as a proxy debate about the nature and status of the Northern Ireland state, this analysis of unionisms viewpoint also has implications for general theories of unionist ideology. It points towards a ...

International Relations in Ireland: A Survey of Academics

In the most comprehensive survey of its kind in Ireland, this article analyses the growing field of international relations and international politics, examining what scholars working in universities in the Republic of Ireland think about international politics and what they are teaching the current generation of students. The article also provides for international comparisons with 10 other countries as the survey is part of a larger cross-national survey, led by academics at the college of William and Mary in Virginia, USA on teaching, research and international policy. The picture of Irish international relations that emerges from the first survey of Irish IR scholars is one of an internationally engaged community of scholars. Irish IR scholars themselves are very international; half come from countries other than Ireland and most speak at least one language other than English. This diversity within the Irish academy exposes students to varied global perspectives and helps them to better understand problems that are increasingly global in nature, such as environmental and health issues. Given this, the ‘internationalisation’ of Irelands IR community may be one of the fields greatest strengths and indeed the Irish academys comparative advantage. Perhaps because of this diversity, IR scholarship and teaching at Irish universities does not fall under any single hegemonic theoretical, methodological or ideological perspective. Instead, the field is characterised by vibrant theoretical and methodological debates drawing on scholarship and evidence from the United States, Western Europe and other countries and regions. Individual scholars in Ireland, however, do seem to be less likely to draw equally on rationalist and constructivist approaches in their work, more likely than their international colleagues to see their work exclusively in one approach, and much more likely than international colleagues to describe their work exclusively as rationalist.

Public Opinion and Development Issues: a Survey of Irish University Student Opinions

Surveys of Irish public opinion on international development assistance have shown high levels of support combined with relatively low levels of knowledge. This article discusses the finding of a survey of university students in Ireland in 2006-7. The results suggest that the attitudes of students in Ireland closely mirror that of the wider population. They are supportive of aid and think official aid from the government should be increased. Irish development NGOs are seen as the public face of development assistance and there is little recognition of Irish Aid – the state’s official development agency. While there is awareness of the importance of structural issues such as trade access and debt relief, the spontaneous responses to what needs to be done to allow development still focus on aid and volunteering. Students are already persuaded that development is important and are motivated to donate or act, development education efforts however need to focus more on creating a better understanding of the causes of underdevelopment and the structural factors relating to interactions between wealthy and poor states.

External Actors in Consociational Settlements: A Re-examination of Lijphart’s Negative Assumptions

Abstract This article examines the role played by five independent commissions which managed contentious issues in post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland. It finds that external or international actors can play a very useful role during the implementation of consociational arrangements. The commissions were most successful when they combined international involvement with local composition in keeping with consociational principles. Weak or non-existence international input and behaviours which were not in keeping with consociational principles undermined the commissions and resulted in the failure of the commissions to resolve their respective issues.

The Promise and Future of Neo-Functional Peace: A Reply to Bergmann and Niemann: A reply to Bergmann and Niemann

Julian Bergmann and Arne Niemann claim that ‘neo†functional peace’ was insufficiently conceptualized and empirically unsubstantiated. They draw on the original neo†functionalist literature to propose a logic of spillover to explain the European Unions external policies. We argue that our original article is not damaged by this critique and its explanation of the EUs approach in the Serbia†Kosovo case stands. We accept the need for further work, based on analysis of different examples and sectors, which can clarify the conceptual boundaries of neo†functional peace and test it against other cases.

Ireland, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation

In this introduction to Irish Studies in International Affairs I share the normal duty of presenting the papers with two other colleagues—Mervyn O’Driscoll and Jamie Walsh of University College Cork, who organised the symposium on disarmament and non-proliferation, hosted in Academy House, Dublin, in March 2014, from which nine of the first twelve papers in this issue are drawn. As organisers of the event I will leave the honour of introducing those papers to their piece, which follows, but will add my own thanks to all the symposium participants for making their papers available for publication in this year’s volume. This allows the journal to deal comprehensively with a topic that has been explored frequently in individual papers over the years, indicating an ongoing Irish interest in the matter. The range of topics covered by the seminar papers and the expertise involved is impressive, and the human dimension of the debate could not be captured more appropriately than by the inclusion of the testimony by Ms Setsuko Thurlow, survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb attack. We are again grateful to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for its support for the symposium itself, and for its on-going support for the journal. I would like to thank in particular the then Minister of State at the department, Joe Costello, TD, for speaking at the symposium and for making his contribution available for inclusion in the journal. In addition to the papers directly related to the symposium, three additional papers on disarmament and non-proliferation are included in this volume. A paper by Mervyn and Jamie argues that the Irish contribution to the first Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, in 1975, was important in establishing the credibility of the treaty as an instrument of international law. Saira Bano of the University of Calgary offers a clear and critical analysis of the Indian government’s successful negotiation of international acceptance of its nuclear trade deal with the US, despite its not being a signatory to the NPT, and argues that the deal undermines international