Religion,truth, national identity and social meaning: The example of Northern Ireland

This article argues that national identity is closely bound up with religion, which in turn is closely bound up with ideas of truth. Different religions will form and transmit different ideas of truth, both moral and cognitive, and transmit them and socialise their members in to holding them. From this a socially exclusive group is formed, which becomes one basis for a nation. This nation becomes morally and cognitively exclusive of non-religious members since they will hold different truths and so cannot be trusted, they cannot be ‘loyal and true’. Ireland and Northern Ireland provide a classic example of this, where Catholic and Protestant were the mediums for transmitting Romantic or Enlightenment versions of the truth and so provided a basis for opposed ideas of nation.     

Into the IRIS: a model for analyzing identity dynamics in conflict

I propose a lens model for understanding how core identities (ethnic, sectarian, racial or national) are affected by past interactions and narratives increasing the chances of the outbreak of violent conflict. The model can be used to show how core identities are polarized during conflict escalation and how they might de-polarize during periods of de-escalation and conflict resolution, leading to potential transformation of core identities in post-conflict situations. Northern Ireland will be used to illustrate the Integrated Relational Identity Structure model, showing how conflicting identities have changed, or not, as a result of history, the conflict and the peace process.     

Political constructions of a cross-community identity in a divided society: how politicians articulate Northern Irishness

ABSTRACT

A shared identity has been shown to reduce prejudice between conflicting social groups. One such common national category is the ‘Northern Irish’ identity which can be inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. This study analyses the plenary sessions of the Northern Ireland Assembly to show how the national category ‘Northern Irish’ is framed by politicians. Content analysis shows that it is used more often by centrist parties who tend to frame it positively and as part of their political viewpoint. There is also evidence of the instrumental use of this identity by unionists in line with the ingroup projection model.     

Ethnic conflict: Causes,consequences, responses

This article claims that while the concept of ethno-nationalism may be taken as shorthand for describing what appear to be the dominant features of certain political conflicts, it possesses little explanatory value – instead obscuring and confusing more than it reveals. Using the Northern Ireland case as an illustrative example, it is argued that the reluctance to problematise or contextualise ethnic claims means that ethnic conflict theorists may effectively contribute to the reproduction of dominant narratives. The article explicitly rejects the notion that a single framework should replace the ethno-national model. Instead, it highlights the importance of focusing issues of timing and historical sequencing, source criticism and empirical evidence, as well as the significance of marginal narratives and experiences.     

Sectarian dynamics of multicultural norms and the law in Lebanon: warning for the future of Northern Ireland

The aim of this article is to show how the institutionalised multicultural political arrangements in Lebanon may have provided for a certain period a degree of local harmony and related toleration when national demographics were relatively stable (or demographic growth was somehow similar within groups or harmony was somehow imposed) but it has not been a force for the same once demographic change has (dramatically) occurred, since it automatically undermined the basis on which any agreement was founded. In addition, whatever harmony it does produce at the national level is not reciprocated at the local level. Indeed multiculturalism may well be a defining feature in the implosion of the Lebanon as a nation state. The reason for this is that any polity to be stable must be inclusive enough at the level of imagined community to encompass change without it being felt as loss by significant groups within the nation state. The institutionalised segregation that the multicultural settlement created in Lebanon does not provide for this inclusiveness since it is predicated on coalitions of exclusive groups (17 religious groups have a political representation in the Parliament) that (often) do not mix or share an imagined community (and, if they do, it is for short-term goals, such as recent coalitions predicated on inter-religious lines, i.e. the anti-Syrian 14 March Alliance) and hence any change is seen not as an inclusive experience to the whole but as exclusive and therefore (in the medium term) as a threat. This creates (long term) inbuilt instability and a permanently failing state. Building on a critique to multiculturalism and consociational theory (at least with reference to power-sharing) we further hypothesise that this situation may well be replicated in Northern Ireland since though in a less fragmented, however more radical separation, it appears to be following a similar trajectory.     

Normality unpacked: migration,ethnicity and Local Structure of Feeling among Polish migrant workers in Northern Ireland with a comparative perspective on Scotland

Previous literature on Polish migration to the UK identified a discourse of normality as a grand narrative in migrants’ justifications for living and working abroad. The present article contributes to this literature by asking what happens to this discourse in the circumstances of the UK, where it cannot be easily sustained. To explore this issue, the case of Northern Ireland is chosen and it is illustratively compared to that of Scotland. Using the concept of Structures of Feeling to frame the analysis of semi-structured interviews with Polish migrant workers, the study shows that, on the one hand, migration experience in Northern Ireland seems to undermine the ideal of a normal life as well as the idealised images of the UK that the discourse of normality conveys. However, it also shows that this discourse remains an important feature of migrants’ narratives. In accounting for this inconsistency within interviews, the article proposes the notion of ‘normality through exclusion’. It also shows that, although not straightforwardly different from the experience of migration to other parts of the UK, the experience of migration to Northern Ireland is also characterised by certain subtleties which are well accounted for by the concept of Structures of Feeling.     

Post-agreement societies and inter-ethnic competition: A comparative study of the Protestant community of Londonderry and the white population of Pretoria

The arrival of thousands of international students from Asia and the Pacific after the Second World War has reshaped the social and political texture of Australian life by helping undermine long-held suspicions of inferiority, racial pollution and political disruption. This article examines the transnational experience of sponsored and private overseas scholars in relation to the growing body of transnational theory and suggests why scholarly discourse and Australian museums have largely omitted non-permanent migrants, such as student sojourners. It also suggests how museums might avoid the pitfalls of the multicultural or pluralist imperatives that guide migrant heritage collection and exhibition practices.     

Racial Formation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Mexicans in the United States

Mechanisms of social stratification require the categorical definition of an out-group to that can be excluded and exploited. Historically, in the United States, African Americans have been the subject of a systematic process of racial formation to define socially in this fashion. Beginning in the 1970s, however, and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexicans were increasingly subject to processes of racialization that have rendered them more exploitable and excludable than ever before. Over the past decade, Mexican Americans moved steadily away from their middle position in the socioeconomic hierarchy and gravitated toward the bottom. This paper describes the basic mechanisms of stratification in the United States and how Mexicans have steadily been racialized to label them socially as a dehumanized and vulnerable out-group.     

两汉魏晋南北朝正史“西域传”所见西域诸国的制度和习惯法

本文根据两汉魏晋南北朝正史“西域传”中的有关记载,探讨了西域诸国的王位继承、职官、刑法、婚丧等制度和习惯。     

Discursive Tactics and Political Identity: Shaping Hungarian Greek Catholic Identity at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

After a brief historical and theoretical introduction to the issues of Greek Catholicism in Hungary, the author presents their identity-creation process by way of analysing the Memorial Album published in honour of a pilgrimage to Rome in 1900. Studying the visual and discursive symbolism of the decorative album, the author considers it to be a symbolic representation of a community and an important step in the gradual creation of a Hungarian Greek Catholic identity. Finally, the author points out that the 100 year-old political process and its symbolic manifestation gained new importance as the formerly propagated uniform socialist identity disappeared in the wake of the political changes of 1989–1990.     

继嗣与交换:地域社会的构成--对摩哈苴彝村的历史人类学分析

关于地域社会的构成,宗族继嗣理论注重宗族裂变的作用,社会交换理论则强调"女性交换"的意义.本文通过对摩哈苴彝村口述史材料的分析,揭示了如下两个基本事实第一,宗族裂变分支的散布与婚姻联盟的范围在地域上可以是吻合的,由此消除了继嗣理论与交换理论的对立;第二,在父系社会中,不仅存在着"男性的继嗣"与"女性的交换",而且也存在着"女性的继嗣"与"男性的交换",后者亦为地域社会构成的重要路径.     

少数民族知识精英话语权、社会责任及其困境分析——以内蒙古蒙古族知识精英为例

知识精英是社会的佼佼者,民众的代表,有其独特的社会责任感与使命感。同样,少数民族知识精英在民族社会中的功能和责任十分显著,他们的话语体系呈现出独有的内容特征和权力模式。随着社会的变迁和发展,少数民族知识精英话语体系出现政治的敏感、文化的俯视和知识的异化等困境,致其疏离其社会责任感和使命。少数民族知识精英应在民族社会的民众生活、经济文化发展、教育和制度建设中重新发挥应有的功能,负起神圣的社会责任。     

认同与承认——基于西方相关政治理论的思考

集群且多元,是人类政治生活的基本特征之一。西方学者关于这一议题的学术性争论,对于多民族国家的政治理念和制度安排具有重要的参考意义和价值。总括起来看,普遍主义的基本理论预设在于公民身份不可争辩的唯一性,并据此主张消解公民的民族身份;而文化多元主义虽然部分地反对普遍主义,但强调公民身份的最高地位并将民族身份置于次要的位置。然而,普遍主义和文化多元主义似乎都没有注意到,多民族国家中的公民身份和民族身份其实是一体的两面,而不是处在连续统的不同位阶上的两个不同身份。在多元社会中,多元政治的存在本身就势必要求建立一个能够包容多元的制度架构和法律规范,而在这样一个具有利益表达功能的包容性架构下,民族群体显然应该被视为一个政治集团而不是被剥离掉政治属性的文化集团。本文从相关争论的整理与综述入手,分析了整合多民族社会的不同方案。     

Narratively framing emergent identities in post-agreement societies: patterns of the Northern Irish identity within the provincial media

The research analyses ‘Northern Irish’ identity narratives post-agreement, and examines the configuration of frame agendas in terms of individual narrative components. A content analysis utilised news published through 1997–2014 within Northern Ireland daily newspapers – the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish News and the News Letter. A process of manifest coding produced an emergent coding scheme displaying the relative stability of media frames surrounding the Northern Irish identity as broadly partisan; however, there is also a subtle narrative shift of Northern Irish identity across the time periods; and findings of a dominant framing paradigm of political and social conceptions of identification post-agreement.     

Identity,causality and social cohesion

According to the Identity Thesis, sharing an identity tends to promote social cohesion. The article focuses on two aspects of social cohesion, namely trust and solidarity. It distinguishes between different versions of the Identity Thesis that differ regarding the causal efficacy attributed to specific values and the sharing of values, and with respect to the value sets that may be fed into the thesis (relying on work in political theory on nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism). Having established the existence of different versions of the thesis, four different accounts of why shared identities could be expected to promote social cohesion are considered and assessed.     

中国西南与东南亚跨境民族的形成及其族群认同

中国西南边疆地区与东南亚地区之间的跨境民族是随着中国南部与南亚国家边界的变迁和最后确定以及在这一过程中诸多民族不断迁徙发展而形成的,因此,这一地区的跨境民族在认同各自所居住的国家的同时,许多人又一直对他们的故土保持着一种认同,并与中国境内的相同民族一直保持着密切的联系,这个群体也就成为了联系云南乃至中国与东南亚国家的一条天然纽带。     

Spaces of Muslim Identity in Inverness,Scotland

Each generation of immigrants has its own challenges; for example, how to maintain already constructed identities among first generation immigrants and how to construct identities of the second generation of immigrants. Numerous literature suggests that the previous studies on these topics have been conducted within larger cities such as London, Glasgow or Edinburgh. This article examines how Muslim immigrants in a small city maintain and modify some aspects of their religious and cultural identities. The data consist of 30 interviews conducted with first and second generation of Muslim immigrants in Scotland, analysis of which suggests the size of the city does not appear to affect daily Muslim practices nor their ability to maintain Muslim identity. Rather, access to shared spaces, such as Inverness Masjid and the local halal meat shop, become critical to how Muslim's maintain and modify their identity in a new place.     

论多民族国家中的民族认同与国家认同

如何看待民族认同与国家认同的关系,逐渐成为族际政治研究中的一个焦点话题。文章从个体认同的多重性、民族认同问题产生的根源两个角度,论证了在冲突视角下,将民族认同与国家认同视为矛盾和对立事物的理论观点的不科学性和误导性。科学地认识二者之间的关系,需要一种和谐视角。这种视角认为,民族认同与国家认同存在价值共识和功能上的相互依赖关系,在社会实践中可以和谐共存;二者统一的路径是构建能够有效整合民族异质性与国家统一性的公民身份,完善公民权制度。