Northern Ireland: A Case Study of Intrastate War through an Intersectional Lens

• In Event: The Role of Masculinity in Conflict, War, and Militarism

Abstract

Issues of war and peace are among the most important ones that are the focus of traditional international relations studies. Feminist security studies scholars made important contributions to our understanding of these issues by asking us to think about questions such as “where are the women?” That scholarship asks us to examine questions such as: who made the decision to go to war? How were men, women, and children affected by that decision? Who mattered in the peace negotiations and post-conflict period? Building on these earlier works, feminist scholars focused on gender, considering masculinities and femininities in the context of examining power, war, peace, trade and economic development, and so forth. In addition to gender, scholars increasingly recognized the need for an intersectional analysis of these topics, which include gender but also race, religion, class, age, and ethnicity. Thus, where a realist might focus on the distribution of power and security in terms of military power, and a liberal would focus on international institutions and economic disparities, an intersectional lens examines how war and peace are gendered and racialized, and how that broader perspective increases our explanatory value. An intersectional analysis becomes especially salient when looking at intrastate conflict, where gender, race, religion, ethnicity, class and even generations often become important markers in understanding the origins of the conflict, who is engaged in the violence, and who works for peace or a cessation of the violence. In this paper, we apply an intersectional analysis to the case study of the intrastate conflict in Northern Ireland. Known as the Troubles, the conflict was characterized by thirty years of intense sectarian violence and resulted in the deaths of more than 3,500 people. And the legacy of the Troubles remains today, almost 25 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998 that was supposed to bring an end to the violence and ultimately bring peace to the island. What is interesting about this conflict is that it might appear to be a religious war that pitted Catholics against Protestants. However, the reality paints a far more complex picture that an intersectional analysis will help us unpack. Religious labels become an easy shorthand that obscure the fuller and more complete picture of what the Troubles were really about, why the violence continued for thirty years, and why reaching a durable peace agreement became so challenging. In this paper we ask the following broad question: how did gender, ethnicity, class, and even age, as well as religion, affect the conflict and the post-conflict periods in Northern Ireland? Using an intersectional lens requires that we look at the ways in which the intersection of these variables mattered during the conflict as well as movements toward peace and, by doing so, allows us to get a more complete answer to a series of fundamental research questions. For example, how were different classes not only affected by the conflict, but how did they participate in it? Looking beneath the religious identity of Catholic and Protestant, who was involved with perpetrating and supporting the acts of violence? What group(s) were involved with working for peace at the national levels, but also at the community/grassroots level? And how did gender intersect with religion and economics to influence the course of the Troubles, but also the society that emerged since the signing of the GFA and the advent of “peace?”

Authors

• Joyce P. Kaufman, Whittier College

• Kristen Williams, Clark University