Joseph Ruane

The Roots of Intense Ethnic Conflict May Not in Fact Be Ethnic: Categories, Communities and Path Dependence

This article criticizes two theoretical strategies of approach to ethnicity and ethnic conflict and proposes an alternative. One strategy emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic or ethno-national bond and the resistance to change of the communities thus formed; it explains these phenomena in terms of the deep feeling surrounding the quasi-kin sense of ethnicity. The other strategy emphasizes the contingency, situatedness, variability, even superficiality of ethnic feeling, and shows how the emergent and unstable linkages which constitute ethnic ‘groups’ are formed from an interplay of ethnic categories and ethnic entrepreneurs within a given institutional and legal context. We adopt an alternative theoretical strategy, seeing ethnicity as a distinctive type of ‘thin’ concept which always requiring additional content, and locating it as one factor among many, which, depending on the tightness or looseness of their interlinkages and mutual feedback mechanisms, may form a path dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict.

Path Dependence in Settlement Processes: Explaining Settlement in Northern Ireland

The recent literature on path dependence provides a model that can be used in explanation of ethnic conflict and settlement processes. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article identifies path dependent patterns of conflict embedded in long-term processes of political development whose change may interrupt these patterns. It highlights the importance of long-term state trajectories in constituting and reproducing these patterns, the generation of ‘endogenous’ processes of change and the impact of wider geopolitical processes in strengthening these. It shows how and why factors such as power, perception, networks and institutions vary in their impact on conflict and explains when they work together to produce settlement.

The Politics of Transition? Explaining Political Crises in the Implementation of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement

The implementation of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement has been marked by recurring crises. While each of these has its specific causes, they are symptomatic of contradictions in the underlying conditions of conflict. These made the Belfast Agreement possible, but they also create difficulties in its implementation. The Agreement echoes – not least in its ambiguities – the underlying contradictions, reconstituting the political terrain in terms of them. This has reproduced the tendency toward conflict even among the supporters of the Agreement, whose different responses and ends-in-view reflect the objective uncertainties in the situation. Political crises are likely to continue even after the full implementation of the Agreement.

Protestant Minorities in European States and Nations

Little attention has been paid in the recent scholarly literature to Europes old religious conflicts – particularly those that stem from the Reformation. Yet for a long time religiously informed conflict was the principal source of internal state division and the major perceived threat to state stability and security. This article looks at the institutional changes and cultural renegotiations that allowed traditional religious oppositions, rivalries and conflicts to fade in most contemporary European societies. Focusing on the Czech, French and Irish cases, it argues that neither modernisation, democratisation nor secularisation were enough to resolve deep-set tensions. The long-term resolutions involved a restructuring of polity and nation in a way consistent with minority, as well as majority, culture. In the past – and perhaps also in the present – such opportunities were rare and demanded choice, strategy and political fortune.

Identity, Difference and Community in Southern Irish Protestantism: The Protestants of West Cork

This article looks at how the Protestants of West Cork came to terms with Irish independence, and how they have responded to the major social and political changes of the past decades. West Cork Protestants are geographically peripheral to the Southern Protestant population as a whole, and have a weaker socio-economic profile. They live in an area that saw some of the fiercest fighting and worst atrocities in the war of independence and civil war. Their experience throws considerable light on issues of whether Protestants were a privileged or oppressed minority, and whether and how they integrated into the new state. Extensive in-depth interviews are used to show how West Cork Protestants reconstructed their identity, defined their differences from Catholics and maintained community in the years since independence.

Ethnicity and Religion: Redefining the Research Agenda

This article maps some of the effects when ethnicity and religion overlap. Sometimes one category, with its related values and solidarity, is prioritized; this is expressed in the common view that religion is subsumed in ethnicity, and religious labels become markers of ethnic groups. Sometimes the effects are additive, each source of distinction and group solidarity strengthening the other. Sometimes there are interactive effects, with dynamic and emergent properties producing a more complex field of relationship. After tracing examples and arguing against a reductive approach, three avenues for future research are highlighted. First, mapping patterns of interrelation of ethnicity and religion in cultural distinction-making and group formation, showing the conditions and effects of each. Second, looking at the longer-term historical, state and geopolitical conditions for change in these relations. Third, reframing theories and concepts so better to grasp the range of ways religion and ethnicity function in social practice.

Majority–Minority Conflicts and their Resolution: Protestant Minorities in France and in Ireland

How and under what conditions of political and cultural transformation does long-run majority–minority communal conflict come to an end? What is the role of change in identity, power relations and constructions of community? This article looks at three cases of religious and ethno-religious conflict: Catholic–Protestant relations in France, the Republic of Ireland and the island of Ireland. It employs a systemic theory of communal conflict and a path dependence model of persistence over time. It argues that an end to conflict depends on undoing structural and cultural lock-in, and identifies the way in which this has—or has not—happened in each case.

Diversity, division and the middle ground in Northern Ireland

Abstract The Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland are highly differentiated internally. Many see in these internal differences the hope for an expanded political middle ground. The potential for middle ground politics has, however, been overstated. Intracommunal differences are counterbalanced by forces making for intracommunal cohesion and intercommunal division. Strengthening the middle ground will require more radical measures than have yet been attempted.

History, structure and action in the settlement of complex conflicts: the Northern Ireland case

Abstract This article argues for a historical-structural approach to explaining conflict and settlement. It argues that the manner in which institutions function and actors pursue their ends is in part determined by slow-moving interlinked structural relationships whose logic, trajectory and effects can only be identified historically. In complex conflicts such structural configurations generate tendencies to conflict and settlement requires that they be weakened. The article elaborates this model to account for settlement in Northern Ireland. It argues that what made the difference between relative success in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and earlier failures was not short-term actor-oriented mechanisms, or even a lessening of structural inequality alone, but change in a deeper structural configuration, triggered by a change in the role of the British state. The article traces how this was taken forward, and explains why tensions continue. It contributes to debates on the role of political agency and structural constraint in complex conflicts.

The Application of Critical Theory

The application of critical theory to the practical world has been a goal of critical theorists since the foundation of the Frankfurt School. The early critical theorists stressed the practical relevance of their project but their most influential work was highly theoretical and remote from concrete issues and problems. Over the last 20 years, Jurgen Habermas has developed critical theory into a systematic social theory of impressively wide scope and has related it more closely to the empirical social sciences.2 His influence among empirically orientated social scientists is growing. One of the books under review, edited by John Forester,3 exemplifies this trend. It applies Habermass theory to problems in contemporary public life and shows the practical relevance of the theory. However, we raise questions about the method and aim of the book and point to a different but equally important purpose for the application of the theory. Our analysis engages with a problem at the heart of the critical theory project: how to develop theory that meets its own critical and theoretical standards and is at the same time empirically grounded and validated. In his critical theory of modernity Habermas emphasizes the rational potential of modernity and the danger of its eclipse by technical-instrumental concerns. He argues that the interpenetration of state and economy in advanced