Personality Crisis: Terrorism in Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement

• In Event: Building Peace and Reducing Violence

Abstract

The Good Friday Agreement has often been cited as marking the shift away from sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Media and researchers have frequently hailed the agreement as successful in ending armed conflict and promoting cooperation. However, sectarian violence has remained, but the quality and quantity of this violence has shifted. To better understand the peace process, it is necessary to look at how violence has changed over time. Using a newly compiled and georeferenced dataset on terrorism in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 2001, I compare the quality and quantity of terrorist attacks throughout the peace process and in the years directly after the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement (December 1998). By investigating the changes in sectarian violence throughout the peace process and in the years that followed, it is possible to understand better the ways in which the agreement was successful and where the agreement failed.

Using a combination of spatial, quantitative, and qualitative methodologies, I assess changes in the quantity and quality of terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the number of attacks, the deadliness of attacks, the destructiveness of attacks, and the perpetrators of attacks. Through spatiotemporal analysis, it is possible to understand the patterns of violence better and assess changes in those patterns over time. Summary statistics and regression analysis can help evaluate whether these changes are significant. Finally, case studies and process tracing can help us better understand the causes of these changes and their relationship to the agreement. The finding from these analyses can help assess the impacts of the Good Friday Agreement on sectarian violence and inform future peace processes.

Author

• Shannon Colleen Hartmann, University of Nevada, Reno