The sociology of the Northern Irish Peace Process and its Travails
John D Brewer
Lecture to the Cambridge University Russell Society
20 November 2013
Belfast seems at war once more. There are nightly protests, habitual clashes with the police
at contentious marches, regular stone and bottle throwing across so-called ‘peace walls’,
road traffic disruptions caused by hoax bomb threats, even a permanent camp of Orange
Order protestors on a North Belfast street. Observers rightly ask: what sort of peace
process is this?
There has, however, been a fundamental shift in the nature of the conflict. This has moved
from being a political conflict to a ‘culture war’, with contestation now not about the
legitimacy of the state, but over cultural symbols like flags and parading. Accordingly,
attention has shifted away from Republicans (articulating Catholic demands for reform)
towards Loyalists (articulating resistance to change).
It is explaining this shift that focuses my talk this evening. My purpose is twofold: first, I will
show how we might understand peace processes sociologically; and, secondly, how we can
use sociology’s conceptual mapping to analyse the travails of Northern Ireland’s peace
process.
I will be arguing that Northern Ireland has experienced conflict transformation, meaning the
ending of large-scale violence (which in the literature is called ‘negative peace’), but not
social transformation, by which is meant the introduction of justice, fairness and equality in
social relations (what is called ‘positive peace’). It is progressing in its political peace
process, but has hardly yet begun dealing with the social peace process. Let me expand.
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Three critical distinctions define my conceptual map of the sociology of peace processes.
The first is between active and passive peacemaking. The former lives out commitments to
peace as a social practice, so that peacemaking is enacted as a vocation rather than just
talked about; passive peacemaking is full of idealistic commitment but lacks in application.
Many governments, organisations and people talk peace but are passive when it comes to
practice.
To flesh-out the forms that active peacemaking can take, we can utilise Johan Galtung’s
famous contrast between negative and positive peace. Negative peace is desirous of an end
to killings, where peacemaking involves working to end violence; positive peace involves
working toward establishing (or reintroducing) wider principles of justice, equality, fairness
and social redistribution. The former I call conflict transformation; the latter social
transformation. Some peacebuilders can be active when it comes to resolving particular
incidents of violence, in demanding military groups desist from killing and dialoguing with
them to this end; a smaller number advocate and mobilise to achieve social transformation
via engagement with social justice, equality of opportunity, socio-economic redistribution and
the like.
Quite often parties to a conflict can disagree over what they want from a peace process in
terms of conflict versus social transformation - a permanent truce or wider structural change.
The final distinction is between the social and political peace processes. This antinomy
needs more elaborate explanation. All too often peace processes are understood to describe
the negotiation process that results in a settlement and the monitoring of conformity to the
accord afterwards. Negotiated compromise peace deals, in which parties opt for (or are
forced by third parties to accept) second-best preferences in order to resolve conflict, are the
foundation of peace processes. I refer to this as the political peace process.
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I refer to it as the political peace process because it involves management of the political
system and statebuilding. It includes the establishment of new forms of politically
representative institutions, fairer systems of voting, the introduction of human rights law and
associated accountability mechanisms, the introduction of a free press, and the creation of
procedures by which international observers monitor the accord. Emphasis is placed on a
series of political actions that introduce structures and institutions of good governance in the
view that stable statebuilding is the necessary foundation on which all effective
peacebuilding occurs. In this way, the political peace process is said to realise conflict
transformation: the ending of politically-motivated violence.
However, the negotiated settlement is never the end of peacemaking, for accords mostly
leave unresolved the processes for realising social healing. This is what I refer to as the
social peace process, by which I mean reconciliation between erstwhile protagonists, social
relationship-building across a communal divide, civil society repair, and replacement of
brokenness by the development (or restoration) of tolerance and compromise.
These concerns are either ignored by negotiators in the political peace process or assumed
to follow naturally from the signing of the agreement itself. The sorts of actions that focus
the social peace process include truth and reconciliation procedures, forgiveness and
atonement strategies, policies that facilitate and encourage public tolerance and
compromise, new forms of memory work, memorialisation and remembering, public
apologies, new cultural symbols, such as national flags, anthems and the like, and the
reassessment and re-evaluation of identity.
In conflict societies where social inequality is high and was itself part of the causes of the
conflict, as occurs often in settler and divided societies and with wars of decolonisation,
societal healing is greatly assisted by policies of social redistribution, for people’s senses of
justice get confused with their experiences of inequality; the demand for justice is a
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surrogate for demands for social redistribution. When this confusion occurs, the social peace
process is helped by the forms of economic policy adopted in the post-conflict phase and
concerns itself with social policies that address inequality as much as human rights abuses
and injustice. In all these ways, the social peace process involves a process of social
transformation that is much wider than the process of conflict transformation and deals with
issues that are deeply emotional and well beyond the usual terrain of the political peace
process.
The distinction between these two forms of peace process is important for understanding the
tension that often occurs between them in the post-conflict phase. It is often assumed that a
peace process is successfully accomplished and comes to an end when conflict
transformation results in a negotiated political settlement that introduces good governance
structures and stable statebuilding. However, it is naive to assume that social healing and
reconciliation automatically follow once problematic politics are negotiated away and good
governance structures are implemented.
The processes for social transformation are often neglected in the political peace process as
parties to the negotiation concentrate on bringing warring factions to the table, keeping them
there, and eking out the basis of an agreement through trying to establish workable
governance structures and institutions. Peace accords therefore rarely discuss the measures
by which post-violence societal healing is to be effected.
If we focus attention on the political peace process, the domain for its operation and
implementation are naturally political. Peace processes become the responsibility of
governments, and the political actors that make up or aspire to be governments. Political
actors negotiate the settlements, they occupy the new governance structures and oversee
the new institutions, and they either endorse or collapse them, making political decisions
about whether to abrogate or stick with the new political arrangements. International political
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actors often assisted in this responsibility, in the form of third party governments or
international actors connected to regional power blocs or the United Nations.
In this view, peace processes are political affairs, commanded over by politicians, the future
of which is the responsibility of politicians. However, once we recognise there is also a social
peace process, peace processes become everyone’s responsibility and the domain in which
they function and are consolidated widens to include civil society.
There is another problem arising in the tension between the social and political peace
processes. They operate on different time frames. Governance structures and institutions
can be quickly devised and implemented. Statebuilding in the political peace process can
advance quickly, if not necessarily always successfully. Foreign aid money can bolster weak
economies rapidly, so long as it is sustained, and new systems of voting can result quickly in
fairer elections. This compressed time frame is partly the reason why peace processes can
be wrongly perceived to have reached their conclusion when the new institutions are up and
running. There is, of course, acceptance that new governance structures take time to
institutionalise and become embedded but this is seen as just a matter of time. Institutions
carry their own institutionalisation in time.
Social reconciliation, however, has to operate on a much longer time frame. This is
sometimes a source of great frustration as people get exasperated when ancient conflicts
erupt at flashpoints or when societies emerging from conflict seem not to have learned the
lessons of the past. The social peace process, however, is of long duration. This is one of
the reasons why institutional reform in the political peace process can be seen to be
progressing well while interpersonal antagonisms and group conflicts continue, and societal
reconciliation seems as far away as ever.
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Two things follow from these temporal considerations. Social peace processes require
patience. They also demand sustained attention, long after the large scale killing has
stopped. If trust is a casualty of war, patience is of peace. Time frames of expectation are
very short as people want peace on their terms and want it now. But forgiveness, truth,
reintegration, and healing are for the long term, and patience is required because
reconciliation proceeds slowly, stumblingly and sometimes falters. The contradiction is
clear. On the one hand the social peace process poses people challenges that make it
difficult to embrace former enemies, while conversely, people get frustrated and exasperated
when old resentments and divisions resurface.
This is the paradox of social peace processes. They have within them an inherent
contradiction provoked entirely by what I call the problem of expectations. There are two
dimensions to the problem of expectations. Most people want societal healing but without
themselves having to change. It is ‘the other’, the erstwhile enemy who has to make the
compromises; it is ‘them’ not ‘us’ who have to reform. Most people expect accommodation in
others, not themselves; they do not consider they have to move an inch. The second
dimension to the problem of expectations is that most people want the benefits of peace to
accrue to themselves and their group not to ‘the other’. They do not want to see former
enemies benefitting; if it seems that they are being rewarded, their commitment to the social
peace process weakens in the view that it is one sided. For these reasons, the problem of
expectations can stymie the social peace process and the flashpoint outbreaks of renewed
conflict the problem of expectations provoke can infect the political peace process and cause
strain in the working of the new governance structures.
With this conceptual map what can we make of the Northern Irish peace process? Northern
Ireland’s peace process has successfully delivered negative peace or what I call conflict
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transformation. This is sometimes forgotten when we focus on its travails. Politics in
Northern Ireland has come a very long way in a short time.
What drives the travails of the process is the feeling amongst working class Loyalists that
social transformation has delivered them injustice, unfairness and inequality. It is now they
not Catholics who feel oppressed. Accurate or not this perception reflects the failure to
achieve healing in the social peace process despite the gains in the political peace process.
Much of the analytical focus on modern-day Loyalism concerns its politics. The sociology of
Loyalism, however, is much more insightful in explaining the current problems in Northern
Ireland’s peace process.
There is no one Loyalism; there never was, given its fragmentation into several
organisations. But Loyalism is also distinguished now by the social settings in which it
operates. What can be called ‘rural Loyalism’, ‘single-identity town Loyalism’ and ‘urban
interface Loyalism’, of course, share common features, but are also diverging. In particular,
the dynamics facing ‘urban interface Loyalism’ are helping to separate it. By this term is
meant those parts of Belfast, largely in the East and North of the city, where there is a
patchwork of small neighbourhoods of Catholic and Protestant residents, sometimes only
comprising a few streets at a time, who confront each other across largely culturally-drawn
boundaries that mark the place as theirs. It was in these sorts of places that the murder rate
in ‘the Troubles’ was highest, with neighbour killing neighbour, a legacy that is much harder
to resolve.
Intra-Protestant class divisions are real despite appeals to ethno-religious culture. Loyalists
are perceived by many middle class Protestants, most of the mainline Protestant churches
and the mainstream Unionist political parties variously as ‘scum’, ‘an alien people’ or ‘people
not like us’. This view has to some extent been taken up by urban interface Loyalism as a
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self-categorisation and turned into a positive self-image to be expressed by many in their
view that ‘you don’t like us be we don’t care’. This self-image is further isolating urban
interface Loyalism, making it introspective, mistrustful and incapable of seeing where its best
political, economic and cultural interests lie. Above all, the mentality of ‘ourselves alone’ is
counter-productive in the long run because it will not deal with the social dynamics of urban
interface areas, but, rather, make them worse.
The social dynamics isolating and separating urban interface Loyalism are a heady mix of
economic decline, social deprivation, endemic conflict with Catholic neighbours, with whom
there is no co-dependency, as is the case in rural areas, and a lack of effective political
representation. The latter has now reached the point where non-voting is highest in urban
interface Loyalist areas (in complete contrast to working class Catholic areas where breadand-butter class issues articulated by Sinn Fein have lead to a sense of empowerment).
The loss of status for the Protestant working class as a ‘labour aristocracy’, one of the few
gains from the former Unionist ascendancy, has coincided both with economic decline of the
basic industries they once dominated and the wider peace process, encouraging the latter to
be perceived as the ultimate cause of their social problems. It is widely felt by those in urban
interface areas that the so-called peace dividend has passed them by, that the peace
process delivered a Republican agenda and that their culture is under threat as its symbols
become subject to restriction. This is why culture assumes greater importance in Loyalist
conceptions of identity than class and supersedes their experiences of economic decline and
social deprivation. They feel the peace process is to blame and that working class Catholics
got a better deal from the peace dividend. All this resentment gets funnelled into opposition
to a peace process that they think of as largely anti-Protestant.
In passing, note the paradox here. Now that the territorial border has been resolved by the
Good Friday Agreement, with Sinn Fein agreeing to the principle of consent and middle
class Catholics having no support for a united Ireland, it is as if Loyalists have intensified the
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importance of the cultural symbols that separate them from Catholics, and reinforced internal
cultural borders.
But culture misconstrues their problem. Educational disadvantage is very high in Loyalist
urban interface areas in marked contrast to working class Catholic areas (in part because
qualifications were not needed historically by the Protestant working class in order to enter
the ‘labour aristocracy’ but also because of the low esteem in which education is held and
the absence of educational role models). Measures of social deprivation are high, in terms of
unemployment, welfare dependency, crime, anti-social behaviour and paramilitary activity.
There are weak levels of both political capital (by which I mean feelings of powerlessness,
save the default position of strength in street protest), and social capital (that is, high levels
of mistrust, social distance from local Catholics and the Protestant middle class, and lack of
co-dependency with Catholic neighbours).
There is also an undeveloped and distorted civil sphere in Loyalist neighbourhoods, where
there is a shortage of civil society groups to challenge the dominance of the paramilitary
organisations and the Orange Order. Not only has there been no progress in nurturing the
social peace process, civil society in urban interface areas lacks the vibrancy necessary to
develop it.
In these circumstances Progressive Loyalism finds it hard to develop roots or for the
Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) to grow a political mandate. Indeed, what adds to this mix
is the feeling amongst the Ulster Volunteer Force (the military wing of the PUP) that a
political strategy has failed. The UVF has largely given up on the conflict resolution
commitments it showed at the time of the Good Friday Agreement. (The IRA, in contrast, can
show the value of abandoning the military campaign by the political gains of Sinn Fein, which
is now sharing in government.)
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There has thus been a resurgence of militancy amongst the UVF, in part to assert
dominance over rival organisations like the Ulster Defence Association, but also to assert its
local control. There has been a growth in participation in Loyalist bands, if not also in the
Orange Order, whose normal Christian ethos is downplayed as a result of secularisation in
these neighbourhoods. This has loosened religious constraints on members. Parading has
become the only way in which people feel their culture can be expressed, such that its denial
is perceived as a threat to that whole culture, accordingly magnifying its effects. The Orange
Order is unable to assert control over this situation, including over the behaviour of bands
and a minority of its members in urban interface lodges, and the PUP fears being seen as
irrelevant when the UVF openly ignores its advice.
In an already distorted civil sphere, the normal restraints are relaxed. The Loyalist protesters
are thus at the point of becoming a law unto themselves, resistant to conventional appeals
and values, and subject to the authority, if at all, of new leaders with little organisational skill
or political judgement, who have emerged from among the mass street protesters
themselves. Events are driving the crowds, not political leadership or strategic political and
cultural gains.
Meanwhile the disorder drives away trade, worsens levels of social deprivation and
educational disadvantage, increases anti-social behaviour and weakens normal community
constraints. Urban interface Loyalist neighbourhoods are not only communities that have
turned their face against the outside world, they are communities turned against themselves,
as disorder threatens further social breakdown. This is self-inflicted as much as resulting
from victimisation from outside.
Another regretful outcome is that dissident Republicanism finds sustenance amidst
resurgent Loyalist aggression. Urban interface areas have become the last battlefield in an
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old war. Sinn Fein’s lack of willingness to manoeuvre in responding to Orange Order
initiatives over parades is the result of fear at the growth of dissidents.
Thus, we now have in Northern Ireland processes of cosmopolitanisation coming up against
resistance from countervailing processes that sustain localism. The cosmopolitan lifestyle of
the Protestant and Catholic middle classes in the suburbs is sustained by two opera houses,
several theatres, a world-class Ulster orchestra, wonderful restaurants, vibrant riverside and
street cafe culture, and low house prices, with accordingly high levels of disposable income.
People for whom ethno-religious labels are losing saliency, amongst whom support for
integrated education is growing, respond to the resurgence of the ancient conflict with
disbelief, frustration and growing withdrawal into their hedonistic cosmopolitan life style.
Middle class congregations commute into inner city churches but are disconnected from the
evident problems in the vicinity. Many others abjure religion at all, with the growth of nonidentification and decline in observance rife amongst the suburban affluent, both Catholic
and Protestant (but especially the Protestant middle class). Polls show that the Catholic
middle class have largely lost interest in the idea of a united Ireland (Sinn Fein know they
would lose a border poll and only Republican dissidents keep to this dream) and growth in a
‘Northern Irish’ identity rather than a ‘British’ one is growing amongst the Protestant middle
class.
But cosmopolitanism encounters strong counter forces of localism in urban interface areas,
where socio-economic and political dynamics sustain ancient identities that are peculiarly
local and spatial. True, a ‘Northern Irish’ identity is also adopted by many Loyalists, but for
reasons that Britain is seen as duplicitous in causing their plight, meaning that they can rely
only on themselves.
This withdrawal into an image of themselves as the last defenders – of Protestantism on the
island of Ireland or a united Ireland – means also an avowal of the past. Remaining faithful to
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the past, to the sacrifices shed and the pain of its many victims, has the effect of keeping
alive old hatreds and divisive outcomes. The Haass Commission, currently dealing with the
issue of the past, is thus encountering a sociological problematic for which it is ill-equipped.
The travails of the peace process are spatial, local, even parochial, but they represent a
buffer against which cosmopolitanism has come to a dramatic halt.
People talk of there being a dual speed peace process. In fact we have a two speed
Northern Ireland. Cosmopolitanisation and its malcontents is separating urban interface
Loyalist areas from the rest and within this spatial dynamic lies the problems Northern
Ireland is currently experiencing in its peace process.
Thank you.
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