Lorenzo Cañás Bottos

Fluid or Frozen? Choice and Change in Ethno-National Identification in Contemporary Northern Ireland

Theories of nationality pose a paradox. Given the possibilities of identity plurality and identity shift, why is ethno-national identity so deeply embedded and so prone to produce conflict? Working with in-depth interviews in Northern Ireland, this article illustrates some typical mechanisms of change in national identity. It shows that plurality of identification is compatible with deeply embedded identities, that change in such identities is possible but costly for individuals, and that change in identity content is more frequent and often more important politically than change in identity category. It shows the greater frequency and ease of change in conflict-intensifying than in conflict-ameliorating directions. Thus it explains the “stickiness” of ethno-national identity and its persistent tendency to produce conflict.

Does being Protestant matter? Protestants, minorities and the re-making of ethno-religious identity after the Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions, but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This article looks at how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests that, at least in this case, are as important to identification as social solidarities.

The Moral Boundaries of the Nation: The Constitution of National Identity in the South Eastern Border Counties of Ireland

Abstract This article argues that nationalism is more varied in the way that it constructs its boundaries than contemporary scholarship suggests. In an interdisciplinary, multi-stranded qualitative study of ethno-national identity on the Southern side of the Irish border, it shows the moral repertoires that qualify, conflict with, and on occasion replace, territorial, ethnic and state-centred aspects of national identity. It refocuses attention on the cultural and normative content of imagined national communities, and the different ways in which general norms function in particular communal contexts. It casts a new light on Southern attitudes to Irish unity. More generally, it suggests that a form of ‘moral nationalism’ is possible, distinct from the forms of nationalism—ethnic and civic nationalism and trans-nationalism—discussed in the literature.

Old Colony Mennonites in Argentina and Bolivia : nation making, religious conflict and imagination of the future

This volume examines the Old Colony Mennonites’ historical processes of transformation through the concept of ‘the imagination of the future’. It casts a fresh perspective on a much misunderstood group by focusing on their contribution to state consolidation, conflict, schisms, conversion and deviants.

Generations on the Border: Changes in Ethno-national Identity in the Irish Border Area

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2004/2005, this article explores the construal, change and redefinition of ethno-national identity in Irelands Eastern border counties. Focusing on the structural properties of generational positions that simultaneously enable and constrain individuals’ construal of identity, we analyze changes in the definition of Irishness in relation to recent cultural and political changes on the island.