Border arrangements: there is a higher degree of agreement between the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland than commonly assumed

Edward Morgan-Jones, Laura Sudulich, Feargal Cochrane and Neophytos Loizides discuss the findings of research on the opinions of the different communities of Northern Ireland about border arrangements. They find that the preferences of unionist and nationalist citizens were much more convergent than was apparent at the political party elite and governmental levels during the Brexit negotiations

Citizen Preferences about Border Arrangements in Divided Societies: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in Northern Ireland

Border arrangements are often critical to the successful negotiation of peace settlements and the broader politics of post-conflict societies. However, developing an understanding of popular preferences about these arrangements is difficult using traditional surveys. To address this problem, we use a conjoint survey experiment to assess preferences about post-Brexit border arrangements in Northern Ireland. We map areas of convergence and divergence in the preferences about post-Brexit border arrangements of unionist and nationalist communities, simulate the degree of public support for politically plausible outcomes and identify the border arrangements that both communities can agree upon. In so doing, we outline an empirical approach to understanding public preferences about border arrangements that can be used to understand the degree of support for similar institutional arrangements in other divided societies

Incorporating Citizen Preferences into the Design of Effective Peace Settlements

This paper describes the use of conjoint survey experiments to identify citizen preferences with respect to a possible peace agreement in Cyprus and a border agreement in Northern Ireland. The recommendations offered in the conclusion emphasize the flexibility of the method and its transferability to other conflict settings. Results also suggest ways of reinvigorating stalled peace negotiations (Cyprus) or improving past deals (Good Friday Agreement/Brexit-Northern Ireland) and can help contending groups and mediators identify potential zones of agreement by revealing areas where contending groups’ preferences overlap or differ and where possible trade-offs exist that could lead to greater consensus. Conjoint experiment results can be presented in the form of visual opinion maps and incorporated into interactive software applications. Such applications allow policymakers and the public to examine the elements of peace settlement packages to assess their degree of support by different communities and to evaluate communities’ readiness for peace settlements. Conjoint survey analysis thus serves as a powerful tool for identifying citizen preferences in discrete postconflict situations

Breaking Peace: Brexit and Northern Ireland

Brexit is breaking peace in Northern Ireland and is the most significant event since the partition of Ireland in 1921. In 2021, Northern Ireland will commemorate its centenary, but Brexit, more than any other event in that hundred year history, has jeopardised its very existence. This book examines how Brexit has destabilised what is popularly known as the peace process in Northern Ireland. It assesses the impact of the Brexit referendum and subsequent negotiations between the UK government and the EU on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and on political stability in Northern Ireland. And it explores the way in which Brexit brought contested political identities back into the foreground of political debate in Northern Ireland and how the future of the Irish border became an emblem for conflicting British and Irish visions of the future

Northern Ireland:the reluctant peace

In this thoughtful and engaging book, Feargal Cochrane looks at Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” from the late 1960s to the present day. He explains why, a decade and a half after the peace process ended in political agreement in 1998, sectarian attitudes and violence continue to plague Northern Ireland today. Former members of the IRA now sit alongside their unionist adversaries in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but the region’s attitudes have been slow to change and recent years have even seen an upsurge in violence on both sides. In this book, Cochrane, who grew up a Catholic in Belfast in the ’70s and ’80s, explores how divisions between Catholics and Protestants became so entrenched, and reviews the thirty years of political violence in Northern Ireland—which killed over 3,500 people—leading up to the peace agreement. The book asks whether the peace process has actually delivered for the citizens of Northern Ireland, and what more needs to be done to enhance the current reluctant peace

Beyond the political elites : a comparative analysis of the roles and impacts of community-based NGOs in conflict resolution activity.

For the past two decades, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played an increasingly prominent role in progressive social change throughout the world. In three recent centres of political conflict, Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel/Palestine, a diverse array of peace/conflict resolution organisations (P/CROs) were involved to some degree within the political process, prior to, during and after, the establishment of major peace agreements and ceasefires. To date, the academic literature on these conflicts has concentrated on the elite-level, Track One diplomacy and the struggle between the parties, with little attention being given to the equally important community-based Track Two initiatives, that are essential to building and sustaining peace processes. This article will present new empirical evidence to redress this imbalance. It has two inter-connecting sections. The first will argue that the P/CRO sector has, in different ways (and with varying success) made an important contribution to the peace processes in the three regions. The second section will present new evidence to show that within Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998' was organically linked to P/CRO activity since 1969, in terms of both the personalities and the political debate that surrounded the peace process

Stop-go democracy : the peace process in Northern Ireland revisited.

Political conflict and community sectarianism have plagued Northern Ireland’s society for several generations. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA)of April was seen by many to be an end-point to this particular period of instability and to herald a new beginning for the region based on a carefully constructed range of institutions based on power sharing between the unionists and the nationalists, negotiated through inclusive consensus.This study seeks to examine the problems and difficulties that emerged after the GFA and will attempt to answer the questions: What went wrong? and Why has this peace process experienced difficulties and setbacks during the implementation phase? The study will try to illustrate what problems have emerged in the attempts to implement the institutions of the GFA and explain the wider reasons behind these and why they have become such difficult sticking points in the peace process