An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

This article explores some of the impacts of Brexit on governance in Northern Ireland. A devolved region administered by a fragile and often fractious consociational system, Brexit, and, in particular, the fundamental legislative mechanism through which Brexit is implemented, the December 2020 Northern Ireland Protocol, have worked to increase division across several levels - the inter-governmental, that of regional party politics, and that of grassroots, inter and intra-communal relations. To complicate matters further, that distrust has also markedly manifested itself in the growth of non-aligned political dynamics. Drawing on the work of Pierre Rosanvallon, I suggest that these developments can be conceptualized with reference to ideas about counter-politics and distrust.

Ireland’s ‘decade of centenaries’ means different things to different people. On the one hand, for Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Republic, the term refers to the period bookended by the second reading of the Home Rule Bill in May 1912, which promised a degree of self-government for the island, and the ending of the Irish Civil War in May 1923. On the other hand, for Ulster unionists, the September 1911 march against Home Rule represented a mobilization of some 70,000 people that inspired the following year’s ‘Ulster Day’ where over 500,000 men and women signed the Ulster Covenant pledging resistance to Home Rule. The establishment of a Northern Irish parliament under the premiership of James Craig in June 1921 stands at the end of the unionist decade of commemorations, representing, as it did, a definitive break with the rest of Ireland on the respective basis of a 6/26 county partition. It is partition – the establishment of new political dispensations on the island of Ireland – that is due to be marked in 2021. Therefore, this special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies is published at an opportune moment to take stock of the transformative changes on the island in the context of both this centenary and also at a time of great geo-political uncertainty triggered by the UK’s decision in 2016 to leave the European Union. One hundred years on from partition, Ireland once again stands at the forefront of world events.

This article argues that it is possible to distinguish between a narrative understanding that frames the historical outbreak of the Northern Irish conflict in either structuralist or agential terms. Both of these discursive starting points are fraught with political implications: the former suggests that in the absence of (continuing) fundamental transformation(s) some of the causes of the conflict remain – and may return; the latter suggests that conflict through the proxy of History is overdetermined and that the focus on abstract narratives obscures the choices and omissions that allowed the violence to persist for so long. The article is interested less in the historical verifiability of the structuralist or agential claims than in how those problematics are reflected in the secondary literature. As such, I map two versions of the structuralist narrative – a stronger and a weaker case – and describe an alternative, agential perspective. The paper concludes with an outline of how attention to personal histories and memoirs may provide new ways of incorporating (and troubling) both approaches.

The North of Ireland was historically the most heavily industrialized part of the island. The shipbuilding and linen factories that were critical to that industrialization were centered around Belfast, which emerged in the nineteenth century as an important city of the British Empire. However, the development of working- class politics was troubled by the national question of independence. Marx and Engels, for instance, supported self- determination for Ireland. In addition, religion also intersected with the emergence of class politics: the industrialized northeast corner of the island had been “planted” and settled by Protestants from the seventeenth century, and its overall ethno- religious political culture, outlook, and aspirations became distinct from (most of) the rest of Ireland.The partition of Ireland in 1921 consolidated these differences. In this important new work, Christopher Loughlin takes that critical juncture as his starting point for considering the development and constraints facing leftist politics in Belfast up to the beginning of the Second World War. Although working- class politics have begun to receive renewed attention among historians and cultural studies scholars in recent years, Loughlin’s monograph responds to a gap in research in terms of local history, periodization, and theoretical insight. Drawing on an impressive array of archival sources, he revisits the secondary literature and marshals his arguments and material in a compelling and lucid style.The book might be characterized as a work in a minor key. As he explains in his conclusion, the work substantially revises his PhD research that was conducted at Queen’s University, Belfast. He points out that whereas the latter suggested that “labour failed in Belfast but did also register some success,” the present monograph explores the spectrum of ethno- political forces that tilted the playing field from the start and ensured that “labour and class politics could not have won” (141). “Decisions made in London,” he argues, “resulted in a regionalised state and a peculiar political culture. In this regionalised culture, the power holders become self- perpetuating, utilising an essentially plebiscitary democracy” (142). He explains that the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) outbid the Left ideologically as well as outflanked it electorally through the move from proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PRSTV) to first- past- the- post. Thereby, the UUP won “dominance without hegemony” by the end of the 1930s (140).Loughlin’s book is based on a number of case studies that illustrate the constraints and problems labor in Belfast faced from the time of the founding of the northern state. Chapter 1 represents an overview of the secondary literature and, in and of itself, ought to be required reading for any postgraduate research on the region. Loughlin warns against the ambiguous use of the term “hegemony” to apply to the northern state: “The UUP administration of Northern Ireland created a dominance in the region, but it lacked democratic legitimacy and hegemony” (20). His subtitle references the concept of “moral economy” developed by E. P. Thompson, suggestive as it is of deeply held convictions about the legitimacy of beliefs and customs drawn from their alleged prevalence within a community. The dis/loyalty aspect of his thesis comes in particular from the work of D. W. Miller, who first unpacked the seemingly paradoxical ideological basis of Ulster Unionism, which professed loyalty to the Crown but remained intensely suspicious of Westminster. As Loughlin, interestingly, points out, part of the moral economy of this paradox is the articulation of a politics of difference—a distinction from Catholic nationalists and an assertion of lawfulness even in the context of rebelling against the government (29).The issue for labor was how to negotiate this tricky ideological territory. Drawing on a range of primary and newspaper sources, Loughlin demonstrates that the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) struggled to traverse that terrain, sometimes quite literally. On one occasion, a Sunday rally at a Gaelic Athletics Association (GAA) ground was seen as problematic. The GAA was associated with Catholicism and nationalism, and Protestant workers considered Sunday to be the Sabbath day of rest (61). In addition, in a religiously charged society such as Northern Ireland’s, it was easy for politicians to slur socialism as “anti- Christian” and atheistic (60).The move in 1929 from the “undemocratic and un- British” PRSTV was critical in undermining any chance that the NILP might have had in cultivating a serious class- based alternative to the UUP (70). Loughlin describes how the UUP solidified its electoral dominance and complemented it with a security apparatus that was closely aligned to ideological framings of a moral economy: “the regional administration of law and security, in relation to the labour movement . . . was on the basis of a political- cultural framework of ‘loyalist,’ ‘disloyalist’ and other associated couplets. Those considered ‘disloyal’ . . . suffered victimisation, repression and employment discrimination” (100).Drawing on a range of secondary literature but also on the minutes of the NILP’s women’s section, Loughlin explores how ideological dominance affected women during the interwar years. Loughlin details how although “women’s political agency seems to have continued to be circumscribed by traditional gender conceptions . . . this is only a portion of the story as women were continuing to make cultural and political progress” (135). In large part, this story is one of individual heroics, where working- class women bravely challenged masculine norms and religious mores, often at great personal cost.As the tragically short life of the LGBT+ activist and journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot while covering a riot in Derry, demonstrates, Northern Ireland remains a place where ethno- religious norms prevail and where individuals who make public their discontent at living within those strictures do so at huge risk. Loughlin’s book rescues some of those stories and demonstrates the courage of leftists who tried to provide an alternative vision for the region in the interwar years beyond the ethno- religious division.

Jennifer Todd. Identity Change after Conflict: Ethnicity, Boundaries and Belonging in the Two Irelands. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. 279. $99.99 (cloth). - Volume 59 Issue 2

"The order of victimhood: violence, hierarchy and building peace in Northern Ireland." Irish Political Studies, 34(3), pp. 464–465

Contents: Introduction: state-building and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Soeren Keil and Valery Perry Constitutional reform processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: top-down failure, bottom-up potential, continued stalemate, Valery Perry Party politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, John Hulsey Building the rule of law: judicial reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Meagan Smith Hrle Virtual deterrence - BiH's institutionalized insecurity and the international flight from responsibility, Kurt W. Bassuener Post-war economic transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina - a challenging transformation, Adnan EfendiA and Azra HadA3/4iahmetoviA No exit: the decline of the international administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mateja Peter Successes and failures of transitional justice in BiH: the case of the ICTY, Iva VukusiA Leader-dominated ethnic parties and dysfunctional institutional design in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, Tina Mavrikos-Adamou Power-sharing success and failures in the Western Balkans, Soeren Keil Conclusion: Bosnia and Herzegovina: a failed success, Florian Bieber Index.

"Anglo-Irish Relations in the Early Troubles: 1969–1972." History: Reviews of New Books, 46(2), p. 41