Kristen P. Williams

Resolving Nationalist Conflicts: Promoting Overlapping Identities and Pooling Sovereignty—The 1998 Northern Irish Peace Agreement

Nationalist and ethnic conflicts are a continuing source of tension in the post–Cold War period. The underlying factors affecting such conflicts are threat perception, ethnic security dilemmas, and lack of trust between nationalist/ethnic groups. The challenge is to find solutions to these conflicts. International institutions can establish trust and reduce the ethnic security dilemma by providing multiple forums of representation, promoting overlapping identities, and pooling sovereignty. Pooling sovereignty across a number of international representative bodies leads to increased access to governmental policymaking, with each party having a stake in government, and leads to a reduction in political tension and conflict. Thus, international parliamentary institutions may provide a solution to these conflicts. The British-Irish Peace Agreement (Good Friday Agreement) of 1998 is examined as an illustration of this argument.

Who Belongs? Women, Marriage and Citizenship

This article examines ways in which nationalism, as a concept, is gendered and the impact that that perspective had on women in the Balkans during the wars in the 1990s. The impact on women was especially severe, given the number who were raped or displaced by the wars. In this article, the authors address the ways in which (male) nationalist leaders used citizenship and the imagery of women to alter the perception that the state and society had toward women in general, and to those in ethnically mixed marriages in particular. Importantly, paying attention to the lives of women in ethnically mixed marriages can shed light on the dynamics of civil wars, on their consequences and on the very politics of state-defined citizenship.