The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and Emancipation

A sound academic, historical and theoretical treatment of the Northern Ireland conflict, with insights that are highly relevant for scholars of the Palestine conflict as well. A real pleasure to read. I recommend it highly.

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Northern Ireland is well known for the enduring conflict there over its constitutional arrangements within the United Kingdom. To follow the line taken by the American press, however, it is a religious war in which Catholics and Protestants commit atrocities in their struggle for power. The Dynamics of Conflict, by renowned scholarly duo Ruane and Todd, is an excellent corrective to this common misconception. The book takes readers through the conflict step-by-step, explaining how the changing relationships between nationalists and unionists, Irish and British, natives and settlers Catholics and Protestants, have evolved over the centuries. Despite the evolution of those relationships, what is still more remarkable is the enduring constancy. Overlapping badges of identity have created two strong and self-conscious communities in a very small region where communal politics have subsumed most internal class, gender, and philosophic divisions. Ruane and Todd show how the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland since the 1960s can be seen as the most recent manifestation of an enduring rivalry restructured from an all-Ireland basis into a Northern Ireland-only basis by the constitutional 'settlement' of the early 1920s which divided the island into the nationalist 26-County 'Free State' (now Republic of Ireland) and the unionist 6-County Northern Ireland. The text predates the Good Friday Agreement, but diputes over the implementation of that settlement are a testament to its quality of scholarship.This work must be seen along with the works of John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, Paul Bew, and Arthur Miller as essential for a good understanding of the nature of the Northern Ireland conflict.