Roger Macginty

Guns and government : the management of the Northern Ireland peace process

List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: A New Departure? PART I: THE PEACE PROCESS: A NARRATIVE The Background to the Peace Process Negotiating the Deal Good Friday and After PART II: THE PEACE PROCESS: ANALYSIS Swinging Door: The Politics and Negotiations of the Peace Process Guns and Government: Violence and the Peace Process Third Parties: External Influences on the Peace Process Peace Dividends and Peace Deficits: The Economics of the Peace Process On the Ground: Public Opinion and the Peace Process Poppies and Lilies: Symbolism and the Peace Process Conclusion: A Broader Perspective on Northern Irelands Peace Process Bibliography Index

Introduction: Building and Breaking Trust

The presence or absence of trust is one of the universal factors in conflict and postconflict environments. Yet trust remains under-conceptualised. In part, this underconceptualisation reflects the aversion that many social science disciplines have towards the affective dimensions of human experience. Peace and conflict are emotional experiences and involve empathy, sympathy, forgiveness, rage, hatred, revenge and many other emotions. Many social science disciplines have simply overlooked ‘humanity red and raw’ and have not developed the tools or discourses capable of accessing human feelings. The development of rational choice models, statistical abstractions and studies with a large number of cases, although useful, tend to write the human experience out of many social processes. The concept of trust though rests on human feelings: gut reactions, perceptions and intuition. Such feelings can be infuriatingly elusive, but that that does not absolve scholars from engaging in serious scrutiny of difficult concepts. Just because we cannot measure it, does not mean that it is not there. Moreover, many of the ways in which trust is ‘measured’ tend to be superficial and static. This special issue seeks to describe the role played by trust in a number of Commonwealth States during or after violent conflict. Complicating our understanding of trust are the multiple forms that trust can take. It can operate on the private, public, institutional and political levels and it is not immediately clear how these levels connect with one another. For example, the way that private and institutional trust are articulated and manifested may differ enormously. Moreover, trust has a cultural dimension; it is understood, interpreted, reinterpreted, exhibited, tested and broken in different ways in different societies. There will, of course, be differences within societies as well. Cultural dimensions are often overlooked, and indeed actively ignored, by liberal institutionalism. While the good governance agendas of ‘reform’ and ‘transparency’ might use the rhetoric of trust-building, they are also conformist and tend to crush diversity. Explicitly or implicitly, they may tend to see (non-western) cultural expressions and judgements on trust as being somehow parochial, irrational, non-modern and non-standard.

Editorial: The Commonwealth and the Inheritance of Armed Conflict

The phrase ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ reputedly drives editorial policy in some electronic media outlets. In other words, if the story is graphic and involves bloodshed, then it is likely to attract more airtime. To a certain extent, the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ maxim also extends to the attention devoted to intra-state conflict by academia, NGOs, states and international organizations. Certain cases and certain issues attract more attention than others. For example, the issue of ‘spoiler violence’, or violence that deliberately attempts to undermine peacemaking processes and peace accords, has benefited from relatively generous academic attention. Other issues that are no less pressing, and which have a tremendous potential to affect the quality of life of millions of people in conflict-torn areas, attract less attention. By far the largest causes of death in war-affected areas are public health failures. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed up to four million lives over the past decade. Rather than battlefield deaths, most of these fatalities have been the result of disease and malnutrition as the state has failed to provide public heath care or maintain sanitation and related infrastructure. The key point is that in our rush to concentrate on acute political violence, we may overlook the structural or chronic violence that bedevils many deeply divided societies, including some Commonwealth states. Such chronic violence often takes an indirect form. Rather than the direct violence of shootings and bombings, indirect violence is deeply embedded within social structures and processes in deeply divided societies. It is often latent rather than proximate and may not always be visible to the observer. It includes sectarianism, intimidation, and the militarization of society, all of which have the potential to limit life opportunities, puncture the public optimism needed to seal any peace accord and trigger the recidivism that could drag a state back towards a full-scale civil war. This issue of The Round Table uses contemporary cases from Commonwealth societies to illustrate the risks of indirect violence and chronic conflict. Robert Muggah’s state of the art survey of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration mainly concentrates on the period after a ceasefire or peace accord has been signed in intra-state wars. While such transition periods may be marked by an absence of direct violence, the mere presence of large numbers of former combatants and their armaments will shape the environment in which peace is to be forged. As Muggah makes clear, the demilitarization of militarized societies is much more than a technical exercise. Instead, it is a long-term, expensive and incredibly delicate endeavour. Moreover, as important as the demilitarization of armed groups and their weapons is the demilitarization of the political culture of the war-affected state. The presence of armed groups, even if on ceasefire, can impact upon the distribution The Round Table Vol. 94, No. 379, 173 – 175, April 2005