The Prospect of Multi-Level Voting in Post-Peace Accord Northern Ireland

This article reviews the possibility of multi-level voting in Northern Ireland in the wake of the 1998 peace accord. Post-peace accord elections can act as powerful indicators of the fate of a peace. Using Reif and Schmitt’s framework of second-order elections, it finds some evidence of varying electoral behaviour according to the electoral arena. The article also uses original data from a major opinion survey to assess public attitudes towards the suite of governing institutions with powers in or over a devolved Northern Ireland. The evidence of multi-level voting is limited and does not extend to electors abandoning ethnic voting patterns in the new political dispensation. In fact, it is argued that the very nature of the peace process has encouraged a re-entrenchment of exclusive nationalism and unionism

A material turn in International Relations: the 4x4, intervention and resistance

This article explores how analysis of material objects offers insights into international intervention and reactions to that intervention. Building on studies that examine the 4x4 as emblematic of intervention, the article argues that the 4x4 can also be seen as an object of resistance and agency. To do so, it uses the case study of 4x4 usage in Darfur and draws on primary data including interviews and a UN security incident database. The article is mindful of the limitations of a ‘material turn’ in the study of International Relations, especially in relation to how it might encourage us to overlook agency and structural power. While finding new materialism arguments largely convincing, the case study encourages a note of caution and proposes the notion of ‘materialism+’, which allows for the further investigation of the human/non-human interface, but is circumspect about tendencies towards neophilia, dematerialism, and posthumanism

Everyday peace: how ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict

Many conflicts across Europe and the rest of the world appear impossible to resolve. Yet as Roger Mac Ginty explains, even in the most intractable of conflicts there remains room for individuals and small groups to establish spaces of tolerance and conciliation

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not

Lost in transition: linking war, war economy and post-war crime in Sri Lanka

Scholars continue to draw attention to the link between the war economy and post-war crime. The majority of these studies are about cases of civil war that ended with peace agreements. Sri Lanka’s civil war ended with a military victory for the state armed forces; thus, it can help shed new light on the above link. Situated in the war economy perspective, this article investigates the dominant types of crimes reported from post-war Sri Lanka and the mechanisms linking them with the war economy. The culture of impunity, continued militarisation and enduring corruption are identified as key mechanisms through which the war economy and post-war bodily and material crime are linked. It suggests, although the ‘victors’ peace’ achieved by state armed forces was able to successfully dismantle the extra-legal war economy run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, it was responsible for promoting criminality in the post-war period. Overall, this points to the urgency of breaking away from legacies of the state war economy in the post-war period, before introducing programs of longer term political and economic reform