2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. When it was signed few would have imagined Brexit. This book examines the impact of the Good Friday Agreement on internal and cross-border political and economic cooperation between Northern Ireland, Ireland and Britain, in the context of Brexit. It also examines the impact of Brexit to date and concludes with some scenarios about the longer-term impact of Brexit on the Good Friday Agreement itself and on Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. The volume comprises chapters from leading academics in the fields of Northern Irish and comparative politics who deal with economic and political aspects of the Good Friday Agreement, making an original contribution to the current debates on conflict resolution. It provides a theoretical framework by renowned expert on consociationalism, Brendan O’Leary, as well as a chapter on the British-Irish Relationship in the 21st Century by renowned Northern Ireland specialist John Coakley. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

The aim of this book is to analyse whether the implementation of the peacebuilding elements of the Belfast Agreement contributed to the transformation of the protracted Northern Ireland Conflict. Therefore, this book deals with the following sections of the Agreement: Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity, Decommissioning, Security, Policing and Justice, and Prisoners. The author comes to the conclusion that the majority of the peacebuilding elements contributed to the transformation of the Northern Ireland Conflict. The results of the study were obtained in conducting interviews, in consulting surveys, and in studying reports and other relevant literature on the recent developments in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland is currently enjoying a period of relative peace and stability unprecedented for much of the past half century. Such stability is the product of a variety of factors that has created conditions whereby Northern Ireland now runs its own political institutions for the first time since the early 1970s. International relations and developments since the early 1980s have had a key influence on the Northern Ireland process, and such external influences require renewed attention in assessing the evolution of the Northern Ireland conflict and the recent progress towards long-term peace. Since the abrupt end of the Cold War in the early 1990s in particular, the Northern Ireland dispute, along with many other inter-ethnic conflicts, has felt the repercussions of such geo-political changes, both positive and negative. In this context, many external states, forces and individuals have wielded significant influence over Northern Ireland’s development. The world's only remaining superpower, the USA, has particularly taken a renewed interest in Northern Ireland, an interest bolstered by a President with a genuine interest in the province. Other long-term external disputes such as the Middle East conflict and South Africa’s advance from apartheid have also been inter-linked with the Northern Ireland dispute. The European Union has continued to evolve as a trans-national organisation, and has also sought to influence the easing of sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland. This book seeks to assess the overall impact that such global developments have undoubtedly had on the Northern Ireland peace process, and attempts to offer fresh interpretations of a complex element within that process. Ben Williams, B.A (Hons.), M.A PhD student, University of Liverpool. Book reviews online: PublishedBestsellers website.

This comprehensive and original study is the first to explain in detail how the Good Friday Agreement ran into trouble, why we are still some way from a final settlement, but why a return to war is most unlikely--even in an age where global terror now threatens world order more seriously than at any time in the past. This new edition of an established, authoritative text will be essential reading for students, researchers and academics of Irish politics, conflict and peace studies, and international relations.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ADVENTURE TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AT THE EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL WRITING AWARDS. There are many reasons why it might seem unwise to walk, mostly alone, through the Middle East. That, in part, is exactly why Leon McCarron did it. From Jerusalem, McCarron followed a series of wild hiking trails that trace ancient trading and pilgrimage routes and traverse some of the most contested landscapes in the world. In the West Bank, he met families struggling to lead normal lives amidst political turmoil and had a surreal encounter with the world's oldest and smallest religious sect. In Jordan, he visited the ruins of Hellenic citadels and trekked through the legendary Wadi Rum. His journey culminated in the vast deserts of the Sinai, home to Bedouin tribes and haunted by the ghosts of Biblical history. The Land Beyond is a journey through time, from the quagmire of current geopolitics to the original ideals of the faithful, through the layers of history, culture and religion that have shaped the Holy Land. But at its heart, it is the story of people, not politics and of the connections that can bridge seemingly insurmountable barriers.

Consociational power sharing is often perceived to be the method of conflict management that is most likely to succeed in deeply divided societies. The case of Northern Ireland in particular is heralded by many as a consociational success story. Since the signing of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in 1998, significant conflict transformation has taken place in the form of a considerable reduction in levels of violence and the establishment of power sharing between unionists and nationalists. This book looks at what consociational power sharing achieves after its implementation – specifically, whether it can work to overcome existing identities in divided societies, or whether it simply freezes divisions. It argues that if consociational power sharing is facilitating a move towards a genuinely shared society, this would be demonstrated in the focus of the election campaigns of Northern Ireland’s political parties, which would be almost exclusively based around socio-economic issues affecting the whole population, rather than narrow single identity concerns. However, the book claims that, on the whole, this has not been realised. Although election campaigns are today less strident than they were in the pre-1998 era, it remains the case that they usually foreground single identity symbolism, as it is this that resonates with voters. Whilst consociational power sharing has been very successful in reducing levels of violent conflict and facilitating elite level cooperation between unionists and nationalists, it has been much less successful in reducing divisions within wider society to facilitate a genuinely shared Northern Irish identity. By establishing an important middle ground between consociational proponents and critics, this research will be of significant interest to students and scholars of ethnic politics, political sociology, conflict management, and divided societies more generally.

This study provides guidance on how to best approach the management of an internally-led peace implementation process after violent intrastate conflict, gives an overview of tasks to be taken on, explains the legal framework provided for under international law, and addresses management implications. With a foreword by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Martti Ahtisaari.

This volume is the outgrowth of a conference aimed at situating questions of social justice within the broad social-historical context of our times as outlined by Benjamin Barber in the international bestseller Jihad vs. McWorld. In it, 15 contributors from across the academic spectrum grapple with questions of inequality, culture, communication, education, language, representation, democracy, poverty and power in a variety of local, global, and cross-cultural contexts that extend from North America to Japan, the Middle Ages to Post-Modernity. They are joined by Benjamin Barber whose wide-ranging and insightful contribution focuses on democracy and terrorism, celebrates civil society and includes what he enumerates as “6 rules for democracy.” Written at a time, 5 years out from 9/11, when the Patriot Act and color-coded terror alerts loomed large across the American Landscape; when “water boarding,” “rendering,” “Blackwater,” and “Gitmo” had become household words in much of the world; when globalization and de-industrialization were penetrating and re-shaping societies and lives North and South as the world’s rich grew richer and its poor poorer and wars without end in sight continued in the Middle East and elsewhere, these essays are artifacts of those times—our times. This book should be of interest to many.

Sinn Féin (“ourselves” or “we ourselves”) began innocuously enough, at least in etymology, when founder Arthur Griffith asked the publishers of an Oldcastle paper if he might use their name for a new political party that he was setting up. Since that 1905 founding, however, and through its journey from revolutionary movement to potential political partner in the state it was pledged to destroy, the modern political meaning of Sinn Féin reflects a contradictory and tension-heavy history of Irish republicanism. The New Politics of Sinn Féin is a powerful and revealing assessment of the ideological and organizational development of provisional republicanism since 1985. The first half of the volume chronicles the processes of change that transformed the republican movement from its revolutionary origins to its current role as a civic and legislative power, while the second half explores the ideological implications of this transition. Arguing that the political movement remains a site of contestation between elements of the universal and the particular, Kevin Bean looks especially to the tensions between civic and ethnic conceptions of identity and the nation as a way to define Sinn Féin in its current incarnation—making this an essential volume for anyone concerned with the contemporary state of Irish politics.

First delivered as part of an international conference held at Brest University in November 2007—under the aegis of the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC)—, this collection of essays essentially aims at interrogating history in order to better understand the political and ideological complexity of early XXIst-century Ireland. This complexity reflects, in many respects, Ireland’s uniqueness among the Western European nations. Some of the multiple persuasions within the gamut of Irish political ideology, from the Enlightenment to the present, are thus explored from diverse angles of approach—dialectical, taxonomic, theoretical, practical, individual, collective—, and through a diverse range of disciplines—human sciences, political science, social sciences, literature, philosophy and art history—and themes—from Jonathan Swift’s rhetorical complexity to the evolution of Irish republicanism after 9/11, including the reassessment of Daniel O’Connell’s political ideology, Owenism in Ireland, Oscar Wilde’s socialistic ideology, the ideological development of the Republican and Loyalist prisoners… This unique collection of essays, far from being a static historiographical description, provides food for thought and sheds light on the fascinating ambivalent dynamics lying at the heart of the building process of a modern nation resulting from the aggregate of individual will, collective ideals and Zeitgeist. The impressive variety of issues raised by authors of diverse origins (United States, Ireland, Britain, France), including leading experts in the above-mentioned areas (Richard English, Robert Mahony, Jonathan Tonge, Kieran Allen, John Sloan, Christopher Murray, Vincent Geoghegan…), therefore, widely contributes to the fact that the present book will be intellectually stimulating and enlightening, at least as an introduction, for all the students and scholars of Irish studies and other related disciplines.