Inequality, Identity, and the Politics of Northern Ireland: Challenges of Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation

The peace process in Northern Ireland is often posited as the poster child for successful post-conflict social and political reform. Yet the sustained cessation of violence and growth of the middle-class is paralleled by underinvestment and systemic neglect of those deprived communities most affected by the legacy of the Troubles, having stark implications on the scope of peacebuilding. Inequality, Identity, and the Politics of Northern Ireland: Challenges of Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation examines how the politics of threat and resentment, undergirded by persistent poverty and socioeconomic and gender inequalities across Catholic and Protestant communities shape political conflict, while at the same time opening up new potential sociopolitical avenues of resistance and transformation at the community level. Curtis C. Holland examines how, in the context of rising inequality, emerging intersectional class/place, gendered, and ethnonational identities have been manipulated by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs to incite conflict but can also produce subjectivities through which alternative visions of peace may emerge. The book documents key discourses and events which contribute to insular ethnic identity formation and interethnic conflict but also examines how the same discourses are subject to the agency of citizens, whose reflexivity on the ethnopolitical manipulation and inequalities faced by their communities may potentially provide new prospects for social and political transformation.