M. McGovern

Participation, Truth and Partiality: Participatory Action Research, Community-based Truth-telling and Post-conflict Transition in Northern Ireland

The article assesses some methodological and ethical issues raised by a Participatory Action Research (PAR) ‘truth-telling’ project conducted in Northern Ireland.The authors reflect on their role in the Ardoyne Commemoration Project (ACP), a community-based study that recorded and published relatives’ testimonies of victims of the Northern Ireland conflict.The article addresses two major areas of concern. First, it explores the potential value for post-conflict transition in carrying out PAR-informed, single-identity, community-based research work in a violently divided society.The authors argue that such ‘insider’ research can make an important contribution to developing strategies of conflict resolution, although significant limits need also to be recognized. Second, the article critically assesses the validity of claims to telling the ‘truth’ that such a project involves.The end of legitimating popular knowledge is key to a PAR-based approach and this can have important consequences for post-conflict transition. However, in a divided society such a goal also raises significant questions concerning the issue of partiality and the limits this sets for the nature of the ‘truth’ that may be told.

Truth, Justice and Dealing with the Legacy of the Past in Northern Ireland, 1998–2008

ABSTRACT This article examines the debate on ways of dealing with the past in Northern Ireland from the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 to the present. The British governments recent creation of a consultative group, due to report in June 2008, has re-focused attention on whether or not, and in what form, Northern Ireland might adopt past-focused mechanisms as part of its post-conflict transition process. Against the backdrop of wider international and theoretical perspectives, the article examines the context and character of some of the issues this process is likely to face, particularly around the issue of collusion, and explore public attitudes towards the possible creation of a Truth Commission for Northern Ireland.

Attitudes towards a Truth Commission for Northern Ireland in Relation to Party Political Affiliation

Abstract In Northern Ireland there has been a long‐term and often heated debate, particularly within civil society, about how to address the legacy of the conflict and unresolved issues of the past. This paper critically examines the first large‐scale survey to focus specifically and in depth upon the question of a possible truth commission for Northern Ireland. The paper analyses responses in relation to self‐declared support for Northern Irelands five main political parties (Ulster Unionist Party, Democratic Unionist Party, Alliance Party, Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Fein). The results of the survey reveal a mixed picture on attitudes towards a possible truth commission but suggest that despite obvious, sometimes serious, community and party political differences on a number of important issues, there are also clearly grounds on which consensus exists.

Irish Republicanism and the Potential Pitfalls of Pluralism

This article examines the relationship between the discursive character of Irish republican ideology, the ‘pluralist’ and ‘two tradition’ perspective that underpins the latter. It suggests that mainstream contemporary Republican thought is the product of changing material conditions, externally generated ideological forces and an inherited spectrum of political ideas. These ideas range from the radical and universalist to the ethnically centred and particularist. The paper further argues that it is a communalist rather than a class-based and universalist agenda within republicanism that tends to be promoted by the institutions established under the Belfast Agreement. It is in the contestation of this trend that the future potential of a positive, dynamic and radical republican politics will

State violence and the colonial roots of collusion in Northern Ireland

This article considers the nature of collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitary organisations during the conflict in Northern Ireland in the context of British counterinsurgency theory and practices in prior colonial campaigns. It briefly outlines the nature, pattern and logic of collusion in Northern Ireland before examining some of the key works of British counterinsurgency theorists – Charles Callwell, Charles Gwynn and Frank Kitson – reflecting on earlier imperial experiences. Collusion is understood as an expedient coercive state practice, premised on a ‘doctrine of necessity’, designed to remove ‘enemies’ and induce fear in a target population via a strategy of assassination in which the appearance of adherence to the rule of law is a political end shaping the specific forms of state violence involved. Such a practice, the author argues, is not an aberration in the tradition of British state counterinsurgency violence, it is exemplary.

'See No Evil' Collusion in Northern Ireland

The publication of the official report into the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, when loyalist gunmen shot dead six people in a small, rural bar, provides an opportunity to examine the nature of institutionalised collusion, the state practices it involved and the sectarianised social order which made it possible during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Building on an earlier analysis of the colonial and counter-insurgency roots of collusion (Race & Class, 57, no. 2) this article provides a commentary on the findings of the Loughinisland report and explores two issues. The first concerns new evidence (directly contradicting earlier official inquiries) of state collusion in the importation of arms used by loyalists to escalate their campaign of assassination in this period. Second, the extent to which collusive practices facilitated the actions of loyalist paramilitaries and confounded the investigation of the mass killings at Loughinisland as elsewhere. In terms of both, it will be argued, there is a need to place an understanding of collusion in the wider context of a social order shaped by long-term sectarianised social divisions and violence, embedded in localised power structures, which framed the very institutions and agencies of the state, not least the police and other state forces.

Informers, Agents and the Liberal Ideology of Collusion in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT There is now considerable evidence of systemic and institutionalised collusion between state forces and loyalists paramilitary groups during the Northern Ireland conflict, not least in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Focusing on a critical reading of the 2012 de Silva report into the killing of human rights lawyer, Pat Finucane, this article examines state collusive practices surrounding the handling of agents and informers as evidence of a culture of collusion extending into the highest echelons of state institutions. The article will argue that such practices evidence an approach to state counterinsurgency predicated on a “doctrine of necessity” and what can be understood as a “liberal ideology of collusion”.

The University, Prevent and Cultures of Compliance

Recent years have witnessed a decisive move toward centralised, hierarchal, managerialist decision-making structures in UK universities. Likewise, there is a central paradox at the heart of these changes. Centralisation, bureaucratisation and the ever greater top-down managerial control of academic life have been paralleled, and legitimated, by the language of decentralisation and freedom. This reflects the ‘fundamental paradox of neoliberalism [where the] use of government intervention to establish and regulate markets’ is masked by the rhetoric of the free hand of the market (Letizia, 2015, 33). Likewise, the privatisation of universities, resulting from the wholesale reduction of government funding, is paralleled by an increase of government regulation of what universities do (Docherty, 2015). Such paradoxes are echoed in the specific focus of this article. As part of the 2015 Counterterrorism and Security Act, passed in April 2015, the current UK government has placed a statutory duty, now enforceable by criminal law, upon a broad range of institutional authorities, including departments of social work, hospitals, schools and of course colleges and universities, that in their policies and practices they have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. This is the latest in the tranche of ‘anti-terror’ legislation introduced since 2000 and of the Prevent stream of Contest, the government’s overall counter-terrorism strategy. This paper seeks to explore the likely impact of the ‘Prevent duty’ on the life of the contemporary neoliberal university and the manner in which it enmeshes and deepens further a culture of compliance, restricting inquiry and speech in the name of academic freedom and promoting distrust, inequality and alienation in the name of protection and duty of care. To do so, the paper will therefore examine the two distinct but potentially complimentary threats posed by encroaching cultures of compliance within universities evident in and relevant to the Prevent duty.

Police, Community, Conflict, and Context: Some Thoughts on British Muslim and Irish Comparisons

In February 2011, British prime minister David Cameron delivered a keynote speech on “terrorism and radicalisation” to an audience, including many of his fellow EU leaders, at a European Security Conference in Munich (Cameron 2011). In it, Cameron trailed the current British government’s strategy for “preventing violent extremism,” fleshed out with the publication of updated versions of CONTEST1 and Prevent2 in July and June 2011 respectively (Home Office 2011b, 2011c). As with the prime minister’s Munich speech, the new versions of Prevent and CONTEST make for depressing reading, although not perhaps as was intended. Designed to serve as a stark warning of the existential threat (“not only to lives but to our way of life,” [Cameron 2011]) of “Islamist extremism,” Cameron’s Munich speech and the updated Prevent and Contest policies were depressingly familiar in how they sought to examine, explain, and legislate for the potential challenge of political violence.