Читать книгу Human Rights as War by Other Means - Jennifer Curtis - Страница 10

CHAPTER 1

Whose Rights and Whose Peace?

I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

—George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War”

“We have peace,” declared “Séamus,” a taxi driver in national west Belfast. “And they can have their culture, or whatever they want to call it, as long as it’s not in my face. And I can have mine, and I hope I’m not in their face.”¹ Séamus was explaining to me his attitude toward loyalists and the new, separate peace in Northern Ireland in May 2010, while he showed me around the West Belfast Taxi Association’s new taxi terminal in Belfast city center. The spacious new terminal, its outer walls decorated with murals from Irish legends, serves as a sort of bus station for what are locally called black taxis. Black taxi services began in the 1970s as a grassroots initiative to provide transportation in areas where widespread violence restricted buses’ regular operation. Of course, then, the taxis—one of the radical cooperatives of the period—were illegal and unlicensed. Enterprising activists drove used London hackney cabs up and down main arteries to the west of the city, charging passengers a shilling per journey.

More than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), black taxis are legitimate. The Northern Ireland minister for regional development appeared at the new terminal’s opening in 2010. The association serves the area of nationalist west Belfast. In addition to providing cheap, reliable transportation, the association offers historical tours, nicknamed “terror tours,” in partnership with some loyalist black taxi drivers. (There are similar black taxi services in loyalist west Belfast, but they do not serve as large an area and populace.) Drivers are understandably proud of their new status. The terminal, the history tours, and recognition as a transportation provider are part of a peace dividend for west Belfast.

As the political context changed more than a decade since the GFA, Séamus’s perspective on the conflict changed as well. When our conversation turned to the Protestant drivers on the loyalist Shankill Road segment of the tours, we talked about the Shankill bomb in 1993. This Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) operation killed ten people, including the bomber and two schoolgirls.² “It was terrible,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I’d have been, like, ‘Fuck them’.” With this new, separate peace, sympathy, like terror tours, was possible. Having survived injuries from a loyalist attack in his youth, Séamus’s newfound sympathy was a major shift.

But others are less sanguine about the soundness of this peace and more cynical about enterprises like terror tours. “The problem is that it [the conflict] isn’t over,” another research participant explained a few days after I visited the new taxi terminal. “Ruth” was a long-time activist in the loyalist Shankill area, who, like Séamus, had experienced loss during the conflict. Now working for a parenting education program, she had been a community activist for decades, often meeting with foreign researchers, politicians, donors, and filmmakers—including me. Ruth admired the success of development efforts like the taxi terminal and tours, but she had reservations about nationalist interpretations of the peace process: “Some [nationalists] seem to really think that the war was won on their behalf, and the IRA were winners in that way. But there were no winners. We all lost.”

For all the changes in Northern Ireland since the settlement, she said, outsiders struggle to understand that peace is not complete. An American once asked her opinion about “taking the peace wall down.” Ruth replied, “Which one? What do you mean? There’s 88 of them. What are you suggesting?” She claimed that some community organizers make their living monitoring interface areas between nationalist and loyalist neighborhoods, where walls and other defensive architecture have been erected to protect people and property from vandalism and violence. Meanwhile, taxi drivers, Catholic and Protestant, make a living taking tourists to see the walls. But the walls, phone networks, and tours, she argued, are not emblematic of past conflict and present peace; instead, they are persistent expressions of divisions that still require walls to protect people from their enemies—their neighbors.³

Ruth’s and Séamus’s comments articulate differences that characterize postconflict politics in Northern Ireland. Their views on peace are part of wider disagreements about what the settlement has achieved—indeed, what actually caused the conflict. A facile analysis would characterize these as simple nationalist and unionist divides, but the distinctions are finer than that. Different political factions within the broader categories of nationalism and unionism attach profoundly different political values to the “facts” of the settlement, its consequences, and the peace process more generally.

Within republicanism, although most people accept the GFA as a settlement of the conflict, some dissidents argue that the PIRA was defeated because it did not achieve the goal of a united Ireland. Instead, the peace process merely allowed Sinn Féin to become part of the political elite. Some constitutional nationalists—whose representative party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), rejected the legitimacy of armed struggle—see the current agreement as hardly different from a failed settlement two decades earlier, the Sunningdale Agreement. Like the GFA, that short-lived settlement (December 1973–March 1974) consisted of a regional power-sharing legislature and government, as well as cross-border bodies. Therefore, decades of armed struggle to attain essentially the same plan were pointless and tragic.

Meanwhile, some unionists see the settlement as a defeat of unionism and a capitulation to political violence.⁴ Other unionists argue that the GFA has secured union with Britain, making any change to sovereignty dependent on a referendum, and it forced republicanism to embrace political means rather than armed struggle. Further complicating these differences, some unionists and nationalists in each of these camps argue that loyalist discontent with the process stems merely from losing unfair privileges over Catholics. These are only summaries of the differences, of course, but they help as an introduction to contemporary conflicts about what the peace process actually accomplished.

In the midst of these different perspectives, a more cohesive, albeit contested, narrative has emerged, one that commands respect among some politicians, scholars, and many ordinary people. This popular history establishes a central role for rights—political, economic, and human—as a cause and cure of the conflict. The outlines of this narrative are these: after partition in 1921, the new state in Northern Ireland systematically denied civil and economic rights to Catholics and maintained Protestant dominance.⁵ In the late 1960s, when peaceful civil rights demands were met with both loyalist and state violence and state reforms failed, the republican movement was forced into armed struggle. During the conflict, the British state engaged in human rights violations, further compromising the legitimacy of UK governance. In the late 1990s, republicans, unionists, and the British state settled the conflict by agreeing to new political institutions that ensured equal rights for all.

This success story of rights denied by the state, violent reactions, and a peace created by collective commitment to human rights is a political one. As such, it has been exported to dramatically different conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan (see Finlay 2010; Wilson 2010). Its analysis echoes local appropriations of human rights discourse since the 1960s, as well as linkages of human rights and peace that have prevailed globally since the 1990s. Since then in Northern Ireland, human rights have been foregrounded in political rhetoric, the GFA, and its implementation. This account depicts the inevitable triumph of human rights over social and political abuses, echoing the utopian telos of other contemporary human rights discourse (see Moyn 2010).

My analysis here of grassroots rights discourse in Belfast, based on over fourteen years of research, moves away from this contemporary narrative to highlight the historical contingency of rights politics in Northern Ireland. I argue that rights talk has functioned as war by other means, during both the conflict and the peace process, and that the contradictory uses and consequences of rights talk must be acknowledged to assess the role of human rights in resolving political conflicts.

Before this contemporary narrative was constructed about human rights, civil rights activism in Northern Ireland emerged in the 1960s. An uneasy coalition of students and middle-class Catholics protested the injustices of the Stormont regime, which had been dominated by the unionists since partition and had presided over systemic anti-Catholic discrimination in economics and politics. The discourse of civil rights was quickly appropriated in the most communally divided working-class locales of the city that, not coincidentally, endured the most intense political violence from 1969 to 1998 (McKittrick et al. 1999; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). The result was that rights of different varieties quickly became the lingua franca for political demands. In the 1970s and 1980s, these demands focused on economic rights, shifting to the language of political and human rights after the early 1990s.

At the grassroots level, rights talk was translated into everyday advocacy by highly mobilized networks of community organizers. This book traces how local activists appropriated changing transnational understandings of rights and how these appropriations coalesced with communally based politics. Local appropriations of rights talk exacerbated an ethnopolitical tendency to treat two broad “communities,” nationalist and unionists, as collective subjects of rights. As a consequence, activists pursued social, political, and economic justice through rights talk—yet their efforts also helped sustain the political conflict. This history of rights discourse demonstrates that rights politics do not play a simple causal role in conflict, nor do they automatically promote peace. Indeed, many of the community organizers I talked to were also combatants in the conflict and acknowledge that some rights-based approaches supported their narrower ethnopolitical goals (see also Shirlow and McEvoy 2008; McAuley et al. 2010). Recognition of this ambiguity facilitates richer understanding of Northern Ireland’s peace process and a critical tension of any peace process: those who must make peace are those whose lives are most enmeshed in conflict. In other words, sometimes, peace processes may appear to be war by other means.

My ethnographic engagement with these communities began in the summer of 1996, during predoctoral fieldwork. On the day I arrived in Belfast, the European Union announced significant funding for community-based organizations, proclaiming a central role for these groups in the peace process (see chapter 4). That summer, local academics and activists introduced me to a number of activists in the city. When I returned to conduct doctoral research from 1997 to 2000, I worked with grassroots organizations in the Falls and Shankill areas of west Belfast.⁶ Initially, I was interested in whether and how this community activism contributed to peace. These neighborhoods presented the opportunity to observe the work of both nationalist and loyalist groups.⁷ Separated from the city center by a motorway and from one another by “peace walls” and interfaces, the Falls (nationalist, approximately 80,000 residents) and Shankill (unionist, approximately 30,000 residents) are broad areas of geographic and communal coherence, comprised of many smaller, distinct neighborhoods (see Curtis 2008). In the late 1960s, these areas of Belfast became epicenters of civil rights protest and political violence. Over the decades of conflict, many residents of these communities were victims of violence, and many served prison sentences for their activities.⁸ In addition to high levels of violence and poverty, these neighborhoods were home to numerous community organizations, the groups that policymakers framed as integral to a grassroots peace process (see NICVA 1993, 1994).

Since 1997, I have conducted long-term fieldwork, oral history interviews, and archival research focusing on grassroots activism in west Belfast. Hundreds of community groups in these neighborhoods have changed their names and goals over the years, yet often the same individuals drove these different incarnations, some since the late 1960s. These groups are dedicated to a range of issues, including economic development, education, housing, health services, recreation, child rearing, and gender issues. Their shared characteristic is being founded and operated by local residents. In practice, their activities can range from arranging pensioners’ luncheons to running daycare centers, from delivering government-sponsored training programs to operating raves for young people. I conducted participant-observation of the routine day-to-day activities of organizations and social gatherings of activists, as well as public meetings held by community groups, conferences, events such as festivals, and annual general meetings held by various groups. I also conducted interviews and oral histories with activists, local residents, state workers, and civil servants.

Over the course of my initial research, 1997–2000, research participants impressed upon me the importance of the civil rights movement for these communities—not in terms of causing conflict but as a catalyst for political mobilization and direct action. Along with this historical consciousness, I was struck by the centrality of rights—civil, political, and economic—to their contemporary understandings of politics and the unfolding peace process. From 1999, I began to explore these connected historical happenings—a grassroots peace process and rights politics—through archival materials. I consulted archival collections at the Linenhall Library, Public Records Office Northern Ireland, West Belfast Economic Forum, and the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action. Subsequently, I conducted follow-up ethnographic and archival research in 2006, 2010, and 2011. However, in 2010, I shifted my research emphasis from the geographical area of west Belfast to a single organization, Belfast Pride, a lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) group.

At that time, during the implementation of the GFA, debates about rights seemed to ossify around nationalism and unionism. Yet the GFA also facilitated tremendous legal changes, and public debates, regarding LGBT rights. Belfast Pride had become the largest cross-communal organization in the north. When I approached the group, board members helped me organize both participant-observation and interviews with activists. Jeff Dudgeon, plaintiff of the landmark case Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, organized access to his papers held by the Public Records Office, as well as other documents he collected during his years as an activist and historian. This research allowed me to trace the history of rights discourse, conflict, and peace along another path, still connected to the 1960s civil rights movement. This path is as partial as any of the others I describe here. Shifting my attention to LGBT rights was determined by circumstances, especially the increasing visibility of LGBT issues after the GFA—just as the announcement of peace funding for community groups steered me toward grassroots activism in 1996. However, as chapter 6 explains, LGBT activism does not exist in isolation from the city’s broader community networks, and some research participants were active in both local groups in west Belfast and LGBT groups. LGBT activism illuminates other dimensions of rights discourse and other ways the logic of rights has permeated everyday politics since the 1960s. This activism also envisions dramatically different postconflict possibilities than the hardened blocs of communalized rights; as such, it enriches this historical account while bringing it to a more satisfying, albeit partial, conclusion.

Histories are provisional as well as partial, and stories like the ones in this book do not end, even with the deaths of individuals. Furthermore, especially in Ireland, history incites passions. Questions engaged by historians are not “merely” academic; rather, they are central to politics (see McBride 2001). Academic debates bleed into newspapers and popular history journals. For example, trenchant critiques are still leveled in such venues against the late historian Peter Hart (1998, 2003), whose study of Ireland’s wars from 1916 to 1922 concluded that the violence was more ethnic than political in character.⁹ This “meta-conflict” about the nature and cause of the conflict is perennially contested, and conclusions are received as a political statement of one kind or another (McGarry and O’Leary 1995). Yet as this much-studied conflict continues to inspire and provoke, conventional conclusions require scrutiny. Bew (2007) writes, “Given the scale of the emotional investment that has traditionally been made [in Irish history], it is difficult to contemplate the possibility that, for all its sound and fury, the tale might not entirely have the comforting significance attributed to it” (ix).

I have written this ethnographic history conscious of these considerations and of the fact that critique can be construed as cynicism. The diminution of political violence, paramilitary demobilizations, the IRA’s decommissioning in 2005, and loyalists’ decommissioning in 2009 and 2010 are significant achievements of the peace process. Nevertheless, the contemporary political narrative about human rights in the conflict and peace process poses more profound social risks than critiques like mine—namely, it perpetuates perilous conditions for a fragile peace, overlooks actual achievements of rights advocacy, and, by extension, generates flawed prescriptions for other conflicts.

This book has two broad aims. First, I aim to describe local rights talk and activism over time, which are selectively included and glossed over in the new postconflict narrative of human rights. Second, I analyze the course of this activism and what it tells us theoretically and practically. In postconflict Northern Ireland, political realities formed by a logic linking rights and peace potentially undermine the peace process’s greatest success—the tremendous reduction in political violence. Inasmuch as the settlement’s arrangements work by balancing the collective rights of opposed communal groups, it reproduces the limited political interests of unionism and nationalism and institutionalizes ethnopolitical conflict in the mechanics of postconflict politics. Furthermore, without a means to address past violence, the past remains both subject and terrain of conflict. Together, these conditions establish a minimalist peace and implicate rights talk in the continuation of war by other means.

War by rhetorical means is certainly preferable to physical violence. However, rhetoric and practice are not neatly separable, and contemporary rhetoric creates vulnerabilities for the future.¹⁰ The settlement and this new narrative history do not acknowledge how institutionalizing long-standing enmities sustains the potential for violent conflict. Furthermore, by promoting the Northern Irish solution as a model for other conflicts, local achievements are overstated, while the particular circumstances that produced them are underexplored—leaving general conclusions and prescriptions based on them open to question.

New Histories, Old Certainties

The days of humiliation, of second-class citizens and of inequality are over and gone forever…. The Good Friday Agreement and the basic rights and entitlements of citizens that are enshrined within it must be defended and actively promoted by London and Dublin.

—Gerry Adams, Speech to Sinn Féin convention, Navan, December 2004¹¹

Shortly after midnight on October 5, 2010, a car bomb exploded outside a bank in Derry, leaving a massive dent in the reinforced concrete walls, scattering glass and metal across the road, and knocking a police officer at the security cordon off his feet. The explosion occurred about an hour after a telephone warning that provided just enough time to evacuate houses and businesses on one of Derry’s busiest roads. Two months earlier, a two-hundred-pound car bomb detonated outside the Strand police station in Derry, twenty-three minutes after a warning. More than decade after the peace settlement, there were ninety-nine bombing incidents in 2011, nearly double the number for 2009–2010 (PSNI 2011: 5).

Of these ninety-nine bombs, only one resulted in a human casualty, killing a young Catholic police officer whose car had been booby-trapped. Yet these almost-“spectaculars” seemed to indicate that republican opponents of the Good Friday Agreement were gaining support, especially in Derry—the constituency of Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.¹² McGuinness angrily condemned bombings of the city where he once commanded the Provisional IRA. Calling the dissidents “Neanderthals” and “conflict junkies,” McGuinness denounced the same means—violence—and the same ends—unification of Ireland—that he once embraced. The timing of the bomb seemed calculated to embarrass McGuinness, appearing for the first time at a Tory conference. Instead, unfazed, he argued that changing times had made armed struggle obsolete.

Later that day, members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) rushed to condemn the attack.¹³ Sinn Féin MLAs echoed McGuinness, in a profound shift from their earlier refusals to condemn republican violence. The debate captured in a singular moment the new historical narrative about human rights and the conflict that has emerged in recent years and illustrated its logic with striking clarity.

Sinn Féin MLA Martina Anderson, herself convicted of explosives offenses and released under the GFA, offered a robust defense of past PIRA campaigns and attacked the illegitimacy of current violence. In the past, she said, violence had been the only means to protest the injustice of “a state whose institutions were designed and sustained in the interest of one dominant ruling class, … a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people … an Orange state … 50 years of oppression” (Northern Ireland Assembly 2011: 40). Yet “The Good Friday Agreement changed all of that,” she said. “It is quite clear that the conditions that we endured in the past no longer exist” (40). If the conflict was simply due to a lack of rights, then “curing” the conflict by ensuring rights is possible. For some republicans I worked with, this is tantamount to heresy—they did not fight for equal rights within a British state but for Irish sovereignty.

Unionists, of course, were incensed at suggestions that the conflict was necessary. An Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MLA sarcastically thanked Anderson for her “jaundiced and misplaced lesson on the history of this Province,” arguing that “There is no excuse for violence in this Province: there never has been any excuse, and there never will be” (Northern Ireland Assembly 2011: 40). SDLP MLA Pat Ramsey reminded the chamber of a civil rights demonstration in Derry on the same day in 1968 and asserted that “the people of Derry will overcome” (39). He called the dissidents “born-again Provos,” whose violence is neither more nor less legitimate than PIRA’s.¹⁴

Unionists and dissident republicans, some of whom continue to defend armed struggle while others do not, are not the only public skeptics. Henry McDonald, the Ireland correspondent for the prominent British newspaper the Guardian, grew up in a working-class, nationalist community, and he is particularly scathing about the argument that armed struggle was necessary to reform the local state: “The idea that thousands would have to die and thousands more go to jail or themselves lose their lives so we could have an Irish Language Act or the control of policing and justice powers within the Northern Ireland state is a gross, deliberate distortion of history” (see also McDonald 2008; emphasis original).¹⁵

In this section’s epigraph, Gerry Adams, former internee, alleged PIRA leader, and president of Sinn Féin since 1983, treats the GFA as a foundational document that ensures equal rights for citizens with opposed national aspirations.¹⁶ Such characterizations are part of this new political narrative, explaining both the past and future of the conflict in terms of rights. The political power of this narrative lies in its encapsulation of ordinary understandings of the conflict, bolstered with reference to historical facts.

This narrative power became apparent to me soon after the GFA was ratified. “Angela,” a republican community activist from Ballymurphy, was thrilled after the vote to support the GFA in the spring of 1998. I spoke with her frequently in the months following the agreement, and she eagerly discussed current events as they unfolded, such as elections to the new assembly and its televised first session. Part of her excitement about the GFA, she confided, was because she finally felt she had equal rights. She described what it had changed in terms of both abstract ideals and concrete, everyday experiences. It meant, she said, that her Irish nationality was acknowledged as legitimate and that her son could wear the uniform of his Irish-language primary school in downtown shops with pride and without fear of harassment.

I was wary of her enthusiasm. Surely a single document did not eliminate the risk of sectarian abuse overnight? But my concerns about aggressive teenagers in shopping centers seemed misdirected as the summer of 1998 unfolded. In July, loyalist protests at the rerouting of an Orange parade in the town of Portadown escalated into violence and intimidation, and hundreds of families were displaced from their homes. The violence ended when three brothers, aged nine, ten, and eleven, died after a petrol bomb was thrown into their home in Ballymoney. The murders took place in the early hours of July 12, the annual holiday celebrated by unionists and the Orange Order.¹⁷ As the holiday dawned and news of the deaths spread, both parade supporters and opponents were shocked. That day, another controversial Orange Order parade along Belfast’s Ormeau Road was met by a silent protest with black balloons, a sharp shift from assertive protests in previous years. The murders appeared to have shaken even GFA opponents such as the hardline Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) Ian Paisley, who had been stridently proclaiming that the Portadown parade must not be rerouted. But the calm did not last. In August, dissident republicans bombed the market town of Omagh, killing twenty-nine people.

Apparently, not everyone had been notified that the conflict was over. Angela was both grief-stricken and outraged. It quickly became apparent that the Omagh bomb’s planning had occurred in the Republic of Ireland, where dissidents regrouped in protest at Sinn Féin’s acceptance of the Mitchell Principles in 1997.¹⁸ Angela imagined confronting the dissidents herself: “If you feel that the war needs to go on, … why did you go to Dundalk for twenty-five years? Why did you go to Cork? Why, if you feel the war should go on, why are you not in the middle of it, fighting it? … Because I would like to know. I’ve watched it. I’ve watched all the suffering. I have watched the effects of what the bomb does and what the bullet does. And the armed strategy. I’ve watched all that and I never want to see it again.” The political power of the GFA, then, lay in its promise of an ending as much as the much-touted beginning of peace—a longed-for conclusion of violence.

The horrifying violence of summer 1998 seemed to sharpen the resolve across political parties as well as the populace. But the violence also indicated that the deeper causes of conflict are not easily removed. In one sense, Angela and proagreement republicans are correct; the GFA recognizes the aspirations of unionism and nationalism as irreconcilable, stating, “We acknowledge the substantial differences between our continuing, and equally legitimate, political aspirations” (GFA, Declaration of Support, item 5). Yet the GFA and the Northern Ireland Act (1998) that enacted the settlement address this problem with a rhetorical sleight of even-handedness: “the power of the sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of, civil, political, social and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities” (GFA, Constitutional Issues, item 1, my emphasis).

In this fashion, the GFA avoids a broader social reckoning regarding conflict and human rights, framing “both communities,” the opposed collectivities of unionists and nationalists, as primary subjects of rights. Inclusive references to all citizens, diversity, identities, traditions, and parity of esteem obscure, but do not conceal, the extent to which the GFA’s institutions and implementation entrench collective subjects of rights. The GFA’s pragmatic recognition of profound differences between the political aspirations of unionists and nationalists also reproduces those differences, central to the conflict, as the basis for the new rights politics that will ostensibly resolve it. This approach limits the way rights are claimed in postconflict politics, in the same way that rights debates were reduced to assertions of communal entitlements during the conflict. Thus, recognition of “both communities” fails to transform both institutional and everyday debates about rights and provides continuity with the past, rather than an end or a beginning. In the postconflict era, these basic assumptions about two collective subjects of rights also constrain recognition of other subjects of rights and political subjectivities—echoing another politically oppressive feature of the conflict.

Scholarship about the peace process, as much as conventional political wisdom, emphasizes guarantees of rights as a driver of the settlement and downplays the vulnerabilities outlined above. Harvey (2001) argues that due to the agreement’s “explicit basis in the progressive values of human rights, equality and democratic governance … the normative basis for a new beginning is clearly established.” Furthermore, he says, the new institutions aim to “construct a human rights culture” (113). Other legal scholars emphasize the centrality of human rights within the GFA (e.g., Bell 2000, 2006). Some work emphasizes the role of human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the peace process, supporting paramilitaries’ move to democratic politics and making human rights central in the negotiations themselves (e.g., Bell and Keenan 2004; McEvoy 1999, 2001; Mageean and O’Brien 1999). Whitaker (2010) asserts that human rights processes since the GFA, particularly the Bill of Rights debates, facilitated discussions of politics beyond the divisions of nationalism and unionism. Finlay (2010) offers a rare dissent, arguing that postconflict human rights processes have failed in their objective to create principles about which diverse political actors share consensus.

Furthermore, the logic implicating human rights specifically in the conflict’s resolution has been projected causally onto past rights mobilizations. For example, Bell (2006) characterizes the 1960s civil rights campaigns as “essentially demands for more human rights” (358). In contrast, Dickson (2010) contends that early mobilizations made few appeals to human rights principles (15–16). Indeed, he states that subsequent human rights discourse distorts causality, leading “some people” to believe the conflict “was totally focused around human rights and equality issues,” rather than stemming from the lack of consensual political institutions (22).

The facts of causality matter, as the diagnosis of causes determines remedies. In this instance, the solution of human rights and equality is not a completely post hoc rationalization. As both cause and solution, however, the role of rights in the conflict was contested well before the peace process. White (1989) is an earlier example of the argument that state repression in the face of peaceful demands for civil rights led to violent conflict. Heated academic debates have raged as to whether civil rights violations, such as institutionalized anti-Catholic discrimination, were the direct cause of the conflict, as in the six-year exchange between Denis O’Hearn (1983, 1985, 1987) and Christopher Hewitt (1981, 1983, 1985, 1987) in the British Journal of Sociology. This is not to argue that serious scholarship on rights and conflict in Northern Ireland are simply expressions of a zeitgeist; that would be disingenuous and dismissive. Rather, it is to underscore that both political rhetoric and academic analyses have changed over time.

One important change is in terminology. As Dickson (2010) notes, the 1960s protesters in Northern Ireland appealed to civil rights, not human rights. Yet no matter how rights have been designated over time, as civil, political, economic, or human, the discourse of rights has enduring puissance. Williams (1991) captures this quality: “For the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity” (153). This is evident in Northern Ireland, as, for example, when Gerry Adams spoke of “the days of humiliation” being over. Here, Adams evoked historical understandings of Irish Catholic experiences under British and unionist governance (see Cullen 1986). Such claims about how the GFA works indicate the cultural and political power of “rights” in the settlement. However, distinctions about types of rights are analytical as well as descriptive. Moyn (2010) argues that, as human rights became a utopian political project in the late twentieth century, clarity about their definition and legal basis was diminished. Over time in Northern Ireland, distinctions about different kinds of rights and the subjects or bearers of rights have been blurred in the service of the new narrative about the role of human rights in the conflict.

Human Rights in Law and Discourse

Philosophically and legally, human rights are fundamental liberties and entitlements people possess because of their humanity. In the aftermath of World War II, the newly created United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In the 1960s, two covenants were negotiated and became effective in 1976: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Together, these three documents are the basis for international human rights law. This splitting of political and economic rights into separate documents, writes Ignatieff (1999), was a consequence of the Cold War, reflecting “philosophical disagreement between the legal and political rights tradition of Western liberalism and the predominantly social and economic rights tradition of the Marxist world” (317; emphasis original). Civil rights and political rights include principles such as freedom from torture and freedom of expression. Economic, social, and cultural rights are principles such as rights to subsistence and to housing. The covenants contain overlaps regarding rights to self-determination, privacy, and nondiscrimination; and, in practice, rights do not have simply political or economic consequences. For example, education provision (a social right) affects the capacity of citizens to exercise political as well as economic rights.

Both Ireland and the UK ratified the UN declaration and covenants.¹⁹ Additionally, the UK and Ireland are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. The convention is similar to the UN declaration but incorporates some basic social and economic rights. Postwar European states developed the convention, which also has enforcement powers. It established the European Court of Human Rights, a judicial body that allows individuals to seek redress from signatory states who violate these basic rights. The UK was an original signatory nation, ratifying the convention in 1951.²⁰ Ireland ratified the convention in 1953. It was enacted in UK domestic law in 1998 and in Irish law in 2003. Both states also signed the European Social Charter, a complementary treaty expanding social and economic rights.²¹ The social charter was revised in 1996, and an enforcement procedure was established in 1998. The UK and Ireland are signatories.²²

Anthropologist Richard Wilson (2006) explains that, in legal forms like the UN declaration and covenants or the European convention and charter, human rights “do not provide the basis for a fully worked out moral or political philosophy” (78). His point introduces another distinction, one between human rights activism, often called rights discourse, and law (see Wilson 2007: 350). NGOs and social movements do the political work of embedding human rights norms in social life, and the term “discourse” is frequently used to distinguish their activities from law and legal cases, as above in Dickson (2010). With increasing human rights advocacy during the late twentieth century, defining and securing rights became part of everyday politics. Yet appeals to fundamental human rights frequently mask this politicization. McEvoy (2011) writes that the primary weakness of human rights talk is “its tendency to deny the quintessentially political nature of its argumentation” (377). Even the most dedicated defenders of human rights as a project acknowledge its limitations and ambiguities. For example, Ignatieff (2001) recognizes contemporary human rights “idolatry” and states that “rights inflation—the tendency to define anything desirable as a right—ends up eroding the legitimacy of a defensible core of rights” (90).

Critics point out that the malleability of this discourse facilitates co-optation—for example, human rights have been invoked to justify less-than-liberatory projects, such as the substitution of truth commissions for retributive justice (e.g., Feher 1999; Wilson 2001) and as a rationale for military interventions like the Iraq war (e.g., Orford 2003). The ubiquity of human rights NGOs has allowed groups like the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute to enter UN consultation processes, bringing their politics to bear on the United Nations Population Fund’s contraception policies—politics that some see as diminishing economic and social rights for large numbers of humans (see Buss and Herman 2003). An even larger problem sketched by current critics of human rights discourse is that the ideology and rhetoric of human rights masks oppressive political-economic processes (e.g., Gledhill 2003). Some scholars such as Brown (2004) detect a profound disingenuousness whereby human rights politics disable other visions and promote “unchecked globalization of capital, postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism” (461).

“Discourse” and “talk” are sometimes problematic terms to distinguish certain activities from law (see Wilson 2007). One problem is these terms’ lack of descriptive specificity. “Discourse” in contemporary usage often echoes Michel Foucault’s thought on power and resistance, departing from conventional definitions of “discourse” as patterning in language above the level of the sentence (see Curtis and Spencer 2012; Sherzer 1987). In some uses, “discourse” seems to indicate something more like “hegemony” or a slightly modified Althusserian “ideology.” In another vein, using “discourse” in a more linguistic sense to distinguish talk from law is flawed from the perspective of pragmatic linguistics, since a binary opposition of law and talk does not convey the degree to which law itself is linguistically constituted (see Richland 2013; Mertz 1994). Furthermore, framing discourse as a separate category from law betrays an undertheorization of language in use, treating language as mere epiphenomenal representation, rather than as “a constitutive element of material social practice” (Williams 1977: 165). Thus, the term “discourse” can obscure a range of practices that take place, such as research, documentation, lobbying, and education, while setting “talk” in the realm of something less real than law. Yet some terminology is necessary to describe practices outside law or legal proceedings. As Helsing and Mertus (2006) note, “the reality of the human rights field … relies heavily on extralegal mechanisms and on the promotion of human rights norms through diplomacy, the building of human rights institutions, education and postconflict reconstruction and reconciliation” (9). Now, as Dembour (2010) observes, discursive approaches constitute a “school” within the study of human rights (2, 19). As such, “discourse” is an inescapable lingua franca for describing the advocacy and activism considered here.

Ethnographic analysis has contributed to the study of human rights discourse, especially regarding social processes at the nexus of law and politics (see Goodale 2009a, b; Goodale and Merry 2007; Cowan et al. 2001; Wilson 1997a; Wilson and Mitchell 2003). Wilson (1997a) characterizes this program: “part of anthropologists’ brief is to restore the richness of subjectivities and chart the complex fields of social relations, contradictory values and the emotional accompaniment to macro-structures that human rights accounts often exclude” (15). Notable works such as Merry (2006b) describe and conceptualize the globalization of human rights advocacy and its outcomes.²³ In the discourse vein, anthropological work on human rights has made visible its political origins and effects in different social contexts. For example, Speed (2008) argues against simply accepting prior assumptions about rights talk’s political or antipolitical effects: “We can learn more by looking at the various reappropriations of the discourse of human rights, and the ways that they emerge in particular interactions: the way the tool is held by particular social actors in particular contexts” (181).

Despite contradictions and unforeseen consequences, rights talk, especially human rights talk, animates a range of political movements. Such discourse, however, merits scrutiny, rather than reflexive acceptance or dismissal. This scrutiny must critically trace the sources, varieties, and consequences of rights talk, to understand what has been achieved and what has not, and what, if anything, might be useful for general theory or application in other regions. To that end, and to situate the themes of this book, the next two sections consider some substantial political challenges that are not addressed by contemporary narratives about human rights and peace in Northern Ireland.

“Sunningdale for Slow Learners”

Orwell would have appreciated the way ‘an “agreed” Ireland’ turned out to mean the very opposite of a “united Ireland,” while “power-sharing” came to denote “separate spheres,” not reconciliation.

—Roy Foster, “Partnership of Loss,” 2007

In 2003 “Anthony,” a commissioner on the new Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (HRC), resigned his position. He was one of six commissioners to resign or withdraw from the commission in 2002 and 2003. He and his colleagues cited multiple reasons related to the commission’s lack of authority and resources, its approach to drafting a new Bill of Rights, and its approach to handling a contentious dispute between residents of a north Belfast neighborhood. The new commission—created by the GFA—had struggled to establish itself since being set up in 1999. Legal proceedings had made public the commissioners’ internal disagreements about loyalist protests in 2001 at the Holy Cross Primary School (a Catholic girls’ school) in Ardoyne, an area of north Belfast. Although the commission as a whole voted not to become involved, its casework committee committed the HRC to supporting a lawsuit on behalf of some families of the pupils. The suit alleged that policing of the protest violated their human rights.

In Anthony’s view, the scandal and squabbling were part of a broader problem: the commission had become captive to political debates about collective, communal rights and had devolved into a forum for pursuing grievances. The problem, he said, was that society was concerned with only Catholic rights and Protestant rights, fixated on identity issues—human rights were peripheral, even within the body established to promote them. In his view, these circumstances allowed human rights to be a proxy for ethnopolitical conflicts between nationalists/Catholics and unionists/Protestants. Concerns outside these categories were systematically marginalized. Anthony’s commitment to a culture of human rights was indisputable. A lawyer trained at Queens University in Belfast, he had advised the UN, government ministers, and civil servants on human rights policy. He was also actively engaged with NGOs and grassroots groups, and, in the early years of the GFA’s implementation, he conducted public workshops for activists and NGOs to explain the new legal and political structures.

The preoccupation of the HRC with conflicts like the Holy Cross dispute was part of a broader trend. Institutional commitments to parity of esteem between two communities quickly facilitated antagonism soon after the new institutions began to operate. For example, during this period, the Department of Health and Social Services implemented plans made under direct rule to close the City Hospital maternity unit in south Belfast. On its face, this was a sensible rationalization of services, since the hospital was just a mile from the Royal Victoria Hospital, where maternity services were centralized. Belfast’s geography, however, meant that the closure became a political debate about the distribution of both health services and public employment. The City Hospital’s front entrance is on the Lisburn Road, where both nationalists and unionists reside, but it backs onto a loyalist enclave. The Royal is located in the nationalist Falls area. Women from loyalist areas lobbied to keep the City Hospital maternity unit open, arguing that Protestant families would be fearful about traveling to the Royal for prenatal care and delivery.²⁴ The decision was also seen as forcing associated nonmedical workers (janitors, porters, cleaners) to an area where working-class Protestants would not want to travel to work. Both arguments made some sense in the context of increasing segregation in activity and residence since the ceasefires (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). But their logic was grounded in the GFA’s balancing act approach to putative Catholic and Protestant “rights.”

Other conflicts reached the level of farce. In 2001, Sinn Féin proposed a floral display of Easter lilies at the Northern Ireland Assembly, with lapel lilies sold in the lobby to benefit the National Graves Association. Not only are lilies a republican symbol of the 1916 Easter Rising, worn on the lapel by republicans at Easter, but the National Graves Association is dedicated to maintaining memorials to republican dead. The rationale was that, if lapel poppies could be sold to commemorate Remembrance Day, then parity of esteem required lilies to be displayed at Easter.²⁵ A furious DUP recalled the assembly from its spring recess for an emergency debate about the matter. Ultimately, Easter lilies were displayed, but the sale of lapel lilies did not go forward.²⁶ Lest one think these were merely the predictable difficulties that accompany the learning curve of governance, in January 2011, the European Court of Human Rights refused to hear the complaint of a republican prisoner that his human rights were violated when the prison service did not allow him to wear a lily outside his cell.²⁷

The GFA is based on the work of political scientist Arend Lijphart (1977, 1999, 2002). His consociational model prescribes the management of conflict through power sharing among parties defined in ethnic or communal terms. Kerr (2006), a proponent of the system, argues that the power-sharing model is now the globally preferred prescription for constitutional arrangements after conflict, although Finlay (2010) argues that the model’s flaws have become apparent internationally. In Northern Ireland, a proportional voting system is in place, and a governing executive branch consists of ministers selected according to their parties’ numbers in the assembly—the d’Hondt method. The settlement dictates that local assembly members must designate themselves as either “unionist,” “nationalist,” or “other” upon entrance. “Key decisions” must be ratified on a “cross-community” basis—with either a majority of nationalists and of unionists voting in favor or a “weighted” majority with 60 percent overall approval and 40 percent of these designations (see Agreement Reached 1998: 5–6). Key decisions are identified by either the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) or by petition from a “significant minority.”

This model is nothing new. Since civil conflict led to direct British rule and the suspension of the post-partition parliament in 1972, consociationalism has been offered as a solution for Northern Ireland. In 1973–74, unionist protests brought down a short-lived experiment in power-sharing; that experiment came out of the Sunningdale Agreement and is the origin of the SDLP’s Séamus Mallon’s dig at both unionists and republicans when he called the GFA “Sunningdale for slow learners.”²⁸

However, an innovation of the GFA is that it also makes human rights central to the broader consociational framework, with the entirety of section 6 devoted to “Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity.” It mandates the creation of a national human rights institution (NHRI), following a recent international practice that balances oversight of state policy with recognizing the extralegal dimension of human rights promotion. The result was the HRC, established to advise the state on legislation and a bill of rights, promote broader public awareness of human rights values, and pursue investigations and legal challenges regarding human rights breaches. The predecessor of the HRC, the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights in Northern Ireland, existed since 1973, but local activists had deplored it as impotent during its twenty-five-year history. Gay rights activists, who clashed with the committee in the 1970s regarding sodomy legislation, jokingly called it “saccharine,” comparing its superficial authority to artificial sweeteners.

During and after the peace process, the convergence of consociational institutions and continuing divisions within the society embedded human rights discourse into local political conflicts. This outcome must be understood in the broader history of peace and human rights, in practice and in scholarship. Similarities, overlapping objectives, and conflicts between the two endeavors are apparent. For example, both peace and human rights are often traced conceptually to Enlightenment thought (see Howard 2000; Hunt 2008). A recent trend in scholarship on war—organized collective conflict—emphasizes its decline over the course of human existence (e.g., Goldstein 2011; Pinker 2011; Mueller 2004), and this work locates causality for contemporary peace, of sorts, in the growth of modern, democratic states and Enlightenment humanism. Similarly, one strand of historical scholarship on human rights traces an arc of progress (e.g., Hunt 2007; Ishay 2008; Lauren 2011). These analyses of peace and human rights share a broad progressive orientation to history, particularly regarding the Enlightenment and modernity. Yet claims such as Pinker’s (2011) that modern states have progressively led to peace are open to critique; for example, one may reasonably ask how, and for whom, high rates of incarceration in the United States constitute peace. In this vein, valorizing histories of human rights, such as Hunt (2007), have also received sharp critique (e.g., Moyn 2007, 2010).

Nevertheless, since World War II there has been widespread recognition that violent conflict produces violations and denials of human rights. Commonsensically, the resolution of conflict entails recognition of human rights to prevent the recurrence of conflict and to create legitimacy for postconflict institutions. Yet the truism that these practices are interdependent is challenging in practice. Many scholars locate the difficulty of reconciling conflict resolution practice and human rights principles in a clash between the pragmatic (conflict resolution) and idealist (human rights) impulses of the fields (e.g., Helsing and Mertus 2006). Nevertheless, argues Bell (2000), their continuing linkage in theory and actual peace agreements reflects a broader association of justice—regarding representation, state institutions, and past violence—with peace, despite contradictions between conflict resolution’s realpolitik and human rights ideals. Much of the work linking conflict resolution and human rights emphasizes a mutually reinforcing reciprocity or “synergy” between the two areas of practice (e.g., Galant and Parlevliet 2005). Said and Lerche (2006) go farther, arguing that peace itself should be recognized as a universal human right.

The practical challenges of protecting such a right are immense, however, as Donnelly (2006) argues. Other scholars share his reserved perspective on human rights principles and conflict resolution. In fact, human rights advocacy has been shown to be counterproductive for reconciliation in some postconflict societies. For example, in South Africa, human rights discourse has been linked to the substitution of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) for retributive justice (see Wilson 2001). In another case, demands for human rights and disagreements about how to define and secure them have caused returns to violence in Sri Lanka (see Keenan 2006, 2007).

Nevertheless, human rights advocacy and conflict resolution practice share overlapping concerns. These come from a conscious or unconscious concern with a term Said and Lerche (2006) use, “robust peace”—that is, peace beyond the absence of violence. A minimal or negative formulation of peace exists when violence or war is neither present nor imminent. In contrast, “robust peace,” writes geographer Peter Taylor (1991), exists when “the fundamental social structures of the social system negate violence” (80; see also Elias and Turpin 1994). Institutions and processes that allow the pursuit of disagreements through politics, rather than war, are important characteristics of such structures. A robust peace, then, is not the absence of conflict but the presence of legitimate institutions that facilitate nonviolent political debates and negotiation. This institutional element is where consociationalism becomes a tool for conflict resolution. Similarly, human rights advocates are concerned that postconflict law and institutions are both legitimate and just. National human rights institutions are a relatively recent attempt to augment the judicial protection of human rights. As the Northern Ireland HRC’s aims make clear, NHRIs also move beyond the realm of state and law to the more nebulous and contested terrain of society and culture (Smith 2006).

There are also correspondences in theory and practice regarding social spheres. Conflict resolution theory and practice recognize the incompleteness of institutional settlements, acknowledging the roles of nonstate and nonparty actors, including grassroots groups, in promoting broader social changes and reconciliation. These are often conceptualized as “track two” diplomacy, which complements official, “track one” efforts (e.g., Gidron et al. 2002). Curle (1990) devised a model to capture this dimension, calling it “conflict transformation.” Lederach (1995a, b, 1997, 2005) became the leading theorist and proponent of the concept, arguing that “resolution” is not “sufficiently concerned with the deeper structural, cultural, and long-term relational aspects of conflict” (1995a: 201).²⁹ Much of conflict resolution literature emphasizes modeling in terms of temporal phases of conflict; conflict transformation is intended to capture the longer-term, open-ended processes of social change necessary to end violent conflicts. As such, it acknowledges that settlements are not endings, and that elite-focused negotiations do not neatly determine broader social changes that negate violence.

Correspondingly, human rights discourse, as discussed earlier, includes a range of activities that are positioned in a sphere of politics beyond the state. In particular, advocacy and mobilization have been treated as a way to embed political norms, beyond law, which promote human rights—mirroring the claim that conflict transformation creates values that promote peace beyond institutions. For example, Stammers (2003, 2009) argues that social movements were a primary force in shaping current understandings of human rights. Much of this work emphasizes the transnational circulation of human rights and its translation into local cultural consciousness and norms (e.g., Merry 2006b; Goodale 2009b; Risse et al. 1999; Mertus 1999).

These overlapping themes are echoed in the GFA. Conflict transformation entered the lexicon of my Northern Irish research participants in the 1990s, much as human rights had in previous decades. In some ways, the GFA engages with a transformative approach, recognizing that the basic political conflict regarding sovereignty cannot be resolved. The tenets of conflict transformation allowed paramilitaries to accept their irreconcilable differences and seek other means to pursue political and cultural change (McAuley et al. 2010; Shirlow and McEvoy 2008). Meanwhile, the influence of rights discourse is evident in the GFA’s commitment to “parity of esteem … for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities” (Agreement Reached 1998: 4; my emphasis). Yet as the previous section makes clear, human rights discourse also opens up new fronts of conflict. To a large extent, the peace process has been an institutionally focused affair, while social divisions and sectarianism continue under its “semi-benign apartheid” (McAuley et al. 2010: 36). Rather than transforming divisions, human rights discourse has helped reproduce them.

This situation has been strongly critiqued in scholarship. Arguing from the conventional premises of liberal individualism, Wilson (2010) asserts that the GFA’s model makes violence more, not less, likely. Finlay (2010) draws from a Foucauldian critique of liberal individualism to argue that the agreement reproduces ethnopolitics through bureaucratic management. These critics emphasize the compulsory dimension of the GFA’s two-communities model (nationalist, unionist, with the occasional nonnormative “other”) and its foreclosure of other forms of political collectivity. Finlay (2008) is scathing about the GFA’s potential for reconciling politics or people: “All there is, is the constitutional right to hold simultaneously both a British and an Irish passport’ (288). Some scholars defend the model by suggesting that group rights simply recognize social reality (e.g., Harvey 2003). Meanwhile, Whitaker (2010) asserts that a “communalization of rights” has not occurred and that processes like the Bill of Rights consultation created spaces for alternative political debates (26). Others predict future benefits, arguing that consociationalism will allow stability to develop over time, embed equality in law, policy, and everyday life, and ultimately increase choice regarding identity and politics rather than compulsion (e.g., McGarry and O’Leary 2004).

The practical institutionalization of collective rights has led to public and academic debates much farther afield than Northern Ireland, of course. The emergence of liberal multiculturalism in the 1990s is a well-known source of collective rights debates. Advocates such as Taylor (1994) and Kymlicka (2001) call for recognizing group rights because group membership is a primary producer of political subjectivity. In this analysis, recognizing groups as bearers of rights is a move toward a more just society, an institutional protection against pervasive structural injustices rooted in difference. Allowing perceived members of a group the option to self-identify in other ways, a “right of exit,” guards against communal compulsion (Kymlicka 2001). This position has been criticized from many angles.

One critique suggests that defining the subjects of rights collectively is a challenge to a fundamental conception of human rights as individual rights (see Donnelly 2003). A different response is that situating community as a locus of political rights reduces the complexity of political identification to one category (e.g., Appiah 1994). Anthropological scholarship suggests that collective rights models fail to recognize that rights claims produce political subjectivity as much as groups produce rights claims (see essays in Cowan et al. 2001; Wilson and Mitchell 2003; Wilson 1997b). Cowan (2006) points out that liberal theorizing not only ignores how mobilization is productive of groups but that rights of exit are grounded in inadequate awareness of the compulsion and social processes that constitute “choice” in everyday life. These studies underscore warnings that the GFA model may reproduce ethnopolitics over time.

This scholarship sheds light on both the reasoning behind the GFA and the contradictions that have emerged as it was implemented. The Holy Cross case that precipitated the HRC’s first public crisis was an example of broader communal conflict translated into the language of the agreement. A street-level confrontation, much like those during the conflict, became a globally publicized conflict of rights. In June 2001, loyalists from the Glenbryn estate began picketing Holy Cross Primary School in nationalist Ardoyne, north Belfast. The school entrance was located just on the Glenbryn side of a famous “peace line.” Police in riot gear were deployed to protect small girls as they walked to school past lines of enraged adults. The dispute continued for four months, with violent conflicts during the summer break and a resumption of the pickets when the new term began in the autumn. Riots spread throughout north Belfast that autumn and winter, along with attacks on children travelling to other schools. Murals in the area compared the girls’ plight to desegregation efforts in the United States in the 1950s.

Reasons given for the protests varied. Protagonists in the conflict framed the dispute in terms of collective rights and alleged that these rights were being differentially allocated by the state. Families of the girls argued that the protests subjected them to inhuman and degrading treatment—violations of their human rights. Furthermore, they said, police did not use force to stop the protests because the girls were Catholic, but they would have ended any such protest by nationalists. Therefore, police acted in a discriminatory fashion. Loyalists claimed that free assembly was an unconditional right, irrespective of sectarian content or whether violence might be a consequence. They also argued that the dispute was entangled with the disputed Drumcree parade. Since Orangemen in Portadown were no longer allowed to walk on a stretch of road through a nationalist estate, they argued the girls’ right to walk to school near their estate was also conditional.

Parents’ claims became the basis for an unsuccessful challenge of police conduct under the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2000, and under Articles 3, 8, 13, and 14 of the European Convention. As noted earlier, the Human Rights Commission supported the court case, but its chief commissioner disagreed with that decision. His dissent became public when a letter he sent to the chief constable was published in legal proceedings. The commission’s conduct in the dispute has since been called “a disaster” because the HRC and individual commissioners took contradictory public positions and became increasingly divided—the HRC became part of the conflict rather than public advocates for either the protection of vulnerable people or fundamental rights (Livingstone and Murray 2004: 156). The incident also compromised public perceptions of its independence from police and other arms of the state. The court case failed before a high court, the Court of Appeal, and the House of Lords, and finally was ruled inadmissible by the European Court.³⁰ Its long legal journey ended in 2010, when the European Court of Human Rights declared that the case was “manifestly ill-founded” and that, horrific as the protests were, there was no evidence of European convention breach.

The GFA framers could have anticipated the difficulties such a body would face. As former HRC chair Brice Dickson (2010) writes, “The reality is that human rights, like so many concepts, had by 1981 become a propaganda tool in the war of words between all sides to the conflict in Northern Ireland” (22). Nevertheless, from this inauspicious beginning, the HRC soldiered on. Since the Holy Cross debacle, the HRC has made some unpopular decisions, like initiating a judicial review of the local ban on gay adoption; the challenge to the ban was upheld in 2012. It has fulfilled its brief to advise and consult on the Bill of Rights (Whitaker 2010; NIHRC 2008).³¹ Yet after the HRC submitted its advice in 2008, the government conducted its own consultation.

The combination of consociational institutions and collective rights politics has not transformed Northern Ireland’s ethnopolitics. Instead, postconflict rights discourse extended its function as war by other means. The incorporation of human rights discourse into the peace process and the minimal peace being promoted produce other vulnerabilities. These contribute not just to present divisions but to the broader contradictions that both human rights law and discourse create regarding past and future violence.

Casualties of Peace

The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, chapter 9

One March morning in 1998, a few weeks before the GFA was unveiled, I met a research participant for coffee. “Tommy,” an IRA volunteer and ex-prisoner, was agitated. The night before, he said, the IRA had punished a friend’s son who had bought some cannabis for himself and a friend. Paramilitaries burst into his flat, called him a drug dealer, and beat him, taking both the cannabis and the money his friend had brought to reimburse him. In a further insult, Tommy said, they also took a pornographic video and a jar of loose change. “That’s what the revolution has come to,” he lamented. “Stealing a jar of change, some blow [cannabis], and a blue movie!” The young man was fortunate his offense was so slight—he could have suffered far worse. At the time, republicans had executed several people condemned as drug dealers under the cover name “Direct Action Against Drug Dealers” (DAAD). Tommy had been frustrated by the practice of punishment attacks for many years. In the early 1980s, a teenager asked him to arrange for an ambulance behind a local recreation center at a specific time because he was scheduled to be shot in the knees and feared bleeding to death.³²

In the weeks after the Agreement was ratified in May, I met another man outraged by punishment attacks. “Billy” was an affable loyalist, aligned with the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), yet he seemed more interested in fishing than politics. When compatriots shot his brother in the knees, however, he became distraught. His brother’s offense had been to oppose UVF decommissioning after the GFA was ratified. A man in the area had recently lost both legs after a punishment attack, and Billy feared that his brother would as well. As he wept, he repeatedly lamented the fact that his brother was shot by his own friends.

Republicans have long treated the practice of punishment attacks as an assertion of the right to police their own neighborhoods, a popular sovereignty of sorts. Because many nationalist residents regarded the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), now the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), as an illegitimate police force, investigations of petty crimes were often impossible, due to a lack of local cooperation. Yet without a police service, people were vulnerable to crime. Thus, punishment attacks were viewed by many nationalists of west Belfast as an unfortunate necessity (Hamill 2011).

Loyalists, caught in a bind of loyalty to the state, argued that the police were lax about investigating “ordinary” crimes and treated their communities as ghettoes. All paramilitary groups at the time engaged in the practice of beating and even shooting those accused of antisocial behavior—usually young men, who, although undoubtedly disruptive, came of age in profoundly traumatic circumstances. In the years following the ceasefires, while official paramilitary operations against enemies diminished, punishment attacks rose (see Kennedy 2001; Hamill 2011).³³ Government tolerance of such attacks during the GFA’s implementation demonstrated how the realpolitik of conflict resolution clashes with the ideals of both human rights law and discourse. But it also illustrates more profound contradictions created by human rights discourse as it was incorporated within the peace processes.

From the 1970s to the present, punishment attacks have been a feature of life for the people who experienced the highest levels of violence during the conflict. After the ceasefires, punishment attacks sustained legitimacy for armed groups. In the absence of pursuing their military raison d’être, armed groups asserted their authority and relevance through the practice. Indeed, for a brief period in the mid-1990s, when local political parties envisioned a possible settlement in an expansive fashion, some paramilitaries believed they would become part of a new postsettlement policing service. Later, attacks were linked to policing dissent, as Billy came to realize. More recently, republican dissidents have taken up the practice to build legitimacy for their position, engaging in high-profile attacks in parts of west Belfast and Derry.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the media increasingly covered the ongoing punishment attacks. In a communicative culture where caustic wit is highly valued, their persistence during the ceasefires was a source for black humor. In 1996, novelists Robert McLiam Wilson and Glenn Patterson took grim aim at the ceasefires’ conceits with a documentary called “Baseball in Irish History” for Channel 4’s War Cries series.³⁴ Noting a dramatic surge in baseball bat sales since the ceasefires, despite Northern Ireland having only one baseball team, Wilson went to darkly comic lengths to underscore ongoing violence. On camera, he went to a sports shop and bought a bat, making it clear to the clerk he would not be playing baseball. He went to the Sinn Féin office in the Falls Road area of west Belfast to inquire about joining the local baseball team. (Of course, there was no baseball team in the area.) In both everyday consciousness and media coverage, punishment attacks undermined rather than sustained the legitimacy of key actors in the peace process—the combatants themselves.

The practice of punishment attacks in the post-ceasefire and post-settlement periods in Northern Ireland underscores the vulnerabilities that human rights discourse introduces vis-à-vis past and present violence. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was convinced of paramilitaries’ commitment to human rights when they began to organize restorative justice projects during the late 1990s.³⁵ One young research participant who had unpleasant encounters with paramilitaries explained to me that it was difficult to listen seriously to talk of rights for victims of petty crime—after all, paramilitaries used to walk around his estate with baseball bats, not to mention their more violent activities during the conflict. Contradictions between human rights discourse and behavior are not new, of course. The U.S. struggle for independence, with its appeals to liberty, was won in part by slave owners. Such contradictions obviously undermine the credibility of human rights advocates. Local social and historical contexts, as well as the historical uses of rights discourse, determine the degree of skepticism that greets such discourse just as much as the intent of human rights advocates.

More importantly than the problem of disingenuousness, however, the attacks, the political culture they reproduce, and the vulnerability of working-class communities to both petty criminality and paramilitary authority underscore larger problems within the new narrative about human rights and peace. Extralegal attacks by armed, nonstate actors highlight the extent to which the agreement left in place the structures and practices of paramilitarism and a capacity for violence in neighborhoods where an economic peace dividend remains elusive. The new culture of human rights has limits that require acknowledgment.

Punishment attacks undermine the rhetoric of peace, and pose broader questions about the nature of the peace and who actually experiences it. Answers to these questions, in turn, show that human rights proponents have taken different approaches to political violence, contributing to skepticism rather than society-wide attachment to its principles. Claims about the efficacy of human rights within the peace process do not fully acknowledge the contradictory effects of such advocacy. In short, as both a legal and normative framework to describe or address political violence in Northern Ireland, the political effect of human rights also produces legitimacy for a minimal, profoundly differentiated statist “peace.” This quasi-peace and its skeptics are influenced by the GFA’s approach to human rights, the way human rights principles have been translated in rights talk, and particular characteristics of the context of reception.

Human rights laws concern the actions and obligations of states. Paramilitary organizations and transnational corporations do not sign human rights treaties. However distant a given state’s authority may be from the daily lives of putative citizens, legally a state is responsible for violations that occur within its jurisdiction.³⁶ The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was, as Alston (2005) puts it, so concerned with state sovereignty that its assumptions are not adaptable to changing conditions in which states are “competing with quite a few others as the embodiment of power and even authority” (4). Occasionally, McCorquodale (2010) writes, treaty-monitoring bodies like the UN Committee Against Torture attempt to define nonstate actors as “sufficiently ‘state-like’” to merit the status of violators, but, to do so, they must use “a form of legalized imagination” (107–8). Multiple claims against the British state for violations of the European Convention have been successful during the conflict, such as Ireland v. UK.³⁷

However, nonstate actors inflicted the majority of casualties in Northern Ireland, which is unusual for a regional conflict. Recognizing this stark fact is crucial for understanding how rights talk can undermine public confidence in both human rights institutions and the broader peace process. McKeown (2009 [2001]) attributes 2,013 fatalities to republican paramilitaries (55.71 percent), 1,018 to loyalists (28.02 percent), and 378 to security forces (10.46 percent) in the period 1969–2001 (14).³⁸ McKittrick et al. (1999) attribute 2,139 deaths to republican paramilitaries (58.8 percent), 1,050 to loyalists (28.9 percent), and 367 to security forces (10.1 percent) between 1966 and 1999 (1482).³⁹ Sutton’s (1994) earlier analysis yields similar proportions. Of course, positivism cannot convey or contain the subjective experience of violence (Ross 2002; Wilson 2003). Yet outlines of nonstate combatants’ roles, as well as the larger challenges their activities pose for a human rights-based approach, are evident in even the roughest figures. The lethality of nonstate actors indicates a central challenge for human rights discourse in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, scholars frequently focus on state actions rather than engage with the problems that nonstate lethality creates for human rights certainties. Possible and proven instances of collusion by state actors and loyalist paramilitaries, as well as republican informers paid by security agencies, offer more straightforward examples of human rights violations.⁴⁰ For example, Rolston’s (2000) analysis of an increase in loyalist killings between 1990 and 1994 concludes that 56 percent are likely to have involved collusion. Bell and Keenan (2005) argue that “these figures leave open the ‘dark figure’ of collusion” between loyalist paramilitary and state actors” (72). But focusing on state collusion with paramilitaries does not eliminate the problem of how human rights talk can acknowledge nonstate violence. McEvoy (1999, 2001) notes that humanitarian law—international law regarding armed conflict—seems an attractive alternative for acknowledging the violence of nonstate actors in Northern Ireland. But he concludes that this vehicle embroils human rights groups in the parsing of “legitimate” targets, debates about which population groups suffered most, and the legitimacy of different causes.

For many of my research participants, the collision of principles with particular circumstances makes both human rights law and talk inadequate to acknowledge or describe important qualities of the conflict. “I was burned out of my home by Protestants…. My brother-in-law was shot dead by the British Army, and my best friend, who was in the police, was shot by the IRA. Who am I the victim of?” one woman asked me rhetorically in 2010, frustrated by ongoing debates about past violence. Each violent episode presents its own challenges. For example, in 1997, Darren Bradshaw, an RUC constable, was shot dead by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) at a gay bar while he was suspended from duty. Gay rights activists suspect he was a soft target as well as a “legitimate” one, by the paramilitaries’ standards.

The Bradshaw case demonstrates how context is lost in the logic of both human rights law and talk. A police officer was killed by a nonstate organization; this may be a terrorist action or a legitimate military action, depending on perspective, of course. The targeting of a gay man was politically problematic for a group that positioned itself as leftist, and a gay spokesperson justified the operation to the media. In addition to these political dimensions, the shooting demonstrates the intimate dimensions of the conflict, through which victims frequently became vulnerable to targeting. At the time, conservative Belfast had only one gay bar. Bradshaw was most likely targeted through proximity and social knowledge in a gay community that at the time was discreet.⁴¹ Furthermore, from the standpoint of gay activists, homophobia casts a shadow of suspicion on the killing, in light of republican bombings of gay clubs during the years of conflict. Such subjective, social dimensions of violence, like the conduct of nonstate actors, are lost in legalistic understandings of human rights.

McEvoy (2011) has described how legal practice was shaped by the small size of Northern Ireland. So, too, was violence. This meant that daily life was permeated by fear and suspicion, particularly in the areas where I conducted research, where most residents had connections with both victims and perpetrators. The proximity of combat also engendered allegations of cooperation between enemies, in addition to state collusion. For example, some claim that IRA and loyalist contact enabled the 1982 killing of loyalist Lenny Murphy (who was responsible for some of the most horrifying murders of the 1970s) and the 1987 killing of Ulster Defence Association (UDA) leader John McMichael. More mundane connections also existed: the young republican who died planting the Shankill bomb was enrolled in a job training program alongside young people from the loyalist area; indeed, the loyalist who ran the program told me he had been concerned about the young man and contacted his mother a few weeks before the bombing.

Fear and actual risk, then, combined with geography to create a social paradox: profound segregation, which has intensified in the postconflict era, exists alongside the intimate knowledge that characterizes life in small places.⁴² I was introduced to this sense of knowing one’s enemies, or at least having grounded suspicions about them, in typical Belfast form—a joke. A pro-GFA loyalist community organizer once informed me that he had been threatened frequently by the INLA when the group increased armed operations in opposition to the agreement. But, he said, darkly, “Last night, they called me on my mobile, and I says, ‘Right, lads, if youse call me again, I’ll fucking kill both of youse’.” He watched my face and laughed as I absorbed his slight to their membership numbers—as well as the implication that they had his cell phone number.⁴³ Acknowledging this social dimension of the conflict is not intended to depoliticize; rather, it is to highlight the contradictions that are glossed over by both human rights discourse and the GFA’s solution. The existence of possible and actual enemies beyond the state, living within communities of civilians, create conditions in which human rights discourse appears contradictory or even disingenuous.

In an attempt to address the issue of nonstate violence, international human rights NGOs began including nonstate actors in their research and documentation on the conflict the late 1980s and early 1990s. They published reports scrutinizing abuses by the British state, republicans, and loyalists—three broad “sides” containing many fine distinctions (e.g., Helsinki Watch 1991; Amnesty International 1994). In July 2011, I interviewed a former Amnesty International staff member about a shift in organization policy regarding lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) rights. His explanation of the organization’s policy on gay rights led to a defense of another contentious decision made by Amnesty in 1991: to acknowledge abuses by nonstate actors. He argued that as an NGO, rather than a legal body, the group need not be limited by legal definitions. For example, he said, a beating produces similar subjective pain whether inflicted by the RUC or a paramilitary group, and requires recognition in either instance. Yet McEvoy (1999, 2001), an experienced practitioner and scholar, has argued that shifts like Amnesty’s were problematic both in terms of reporting on the conflict and in practice for local NGOs. He writes that, for local human rights advocates, extending attention beyond the state would have been untenable for maintaining the organization’s local credibility. Such a change could have involved greater condemnation for loyalist paramilitaries than republicans and thus undermined the group’s influence.

Nevertheless, local NGOs’ emphasis on state violence convinced many unionists that human rights are a nationalist issue. Generally speaking, many loyalists interpreted human rights criticisms of the state as opposition to union with Britain. Since the basis of republican rhetoric was a challenge to the legitimacy of the post-partition state and British jurisdiction, the focus of human rights discourse on state violations seemed aligned with that larger political project. Efforts by international NGOs to consider nonstate violence intensified critiques of local campaigns’ silence, contributing to the longer-term skepticism that is problematic in the postconflict era.

Today, human rights skepticism exists beyond loyalism. Most strikingly, it is apparent among people charged with upholding human rights standards in the postconflict era. Attorney General John Larkin, the first attorney general since Sunningdale, has argued that rights claims are ubiquitous in the region and that these claims trivialize human rights. Addressing a Human Rights Commission conference in 2010, he noted that the public housing agency had recently asked residents of a particular housing development not to wear pajamas outdoors. Residents’ response to the rule, he said, was “This is our culture,” to which they had a human right. Larkin argued that “Perhaps the outdoor wearing of pyjamas is a useful emblem of our contemporary malaise” regarding human rights and concluded that “Wearing pyjamas outdoors should be left for regulation simply to social courtesy and social decency (and a strong sense of the ridiculous)” rather than treated as a human rights issue (16).⁴⁴ In a less humorous example, in February 2011 the policing federation’s newsletter decried the policing board’s “one-sided” approach to human rights. The newsletter claimed rules regarding human rights protections disregard the rights of police officers facing threats from both rioters and dissident republicans. The editorial condemned legal advice not to publish photographs of wanted rioters under age eighteen as “human rights nonsense.”⁴⁵

Punishment attacks underscore key problems of human rights discourse as peace promotion and highlight the multiple contradictions of rights talk. These contradictions are not merely the result of undisciplined NGOs interpreting legal principles incorrectly. They are also linked to disjunctions between the terms of legality and actually existing experience. How human rights are received and how effectively they can be pursued are not determined simply by how clearly legal and social advocates speak. The effects of discourse are also produced by context-specific circumstances. Complex conditions of production frame contradictory claims for human rights as both a weapon of war and a tool for peace—including, of course, my own claim that rights discourse has functioned as a form of war by other means. This is why the social life of rights discourse over time requires scrutiny, particularly to understand the historical trajectory of different political projects being treated as human rights promotion and then conflated with peace. This history, in turn, explains the consequences and reception of rights discourse in the present.

Rights Discourse over Time

The peace process began when the first stone was thrown.

—Loyalist community activist, August 2010

Human rights have been central to Northern Irish politics, international litigation, and scholarship on the conflict. The civil rights movement, prisoners’ rights campaigns (e.g., protests for political status culminating in the hunger strikes), and extrajudicial killings inspired court cases, media coverage, and academic monographs on both legal and grassroots mobilizations (e.g., Dickson 2010; Ross 2012). However, a historical account of human rights focused only on well-known cases and campaigns obscures important ways rights discourse has worked in everyday politics. Most important, such an approach does not address how rights talk became central to community activism and a vehicle for conflict as well as peacemaking. To acknowledge and explain the ambiguous politics of human rights in Northern Ireland, this book looks at that more subtle historical process: how rights discourse came to permeate grassroots politics and activism, how it transformed these politics, and how rights discourse itself was transformed. This history explains the susceptibility of human rights talk to ethnopolitical appropriation, provides a caution regarding its potential to promote peace, and highlights less recognized contributions of rights discourse to broader reconciliation.

To introduce this history, in Chapter 2, “The Usual Suspects,” I trace the adoption of rights discourse in everyday politics. In the 1960s, both the U.S. civil rights movement and the global student movements of 1968 influenced a local civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland. As in these movements, campaigners faced both state and civil violence. In Northern Ireland, however, civil violence became widespread and routine. In subsequent years, grassroots NGOs in the most polarized areas appropriated both the rhetoric and tactics of civil rights to express grievances about housing and communal space. This was, as I argue, a crucial moment when rights talk became central to everyday political understandings and actions. The rhetoric of rights subsequently became a common political tool in grassroots politics. Chapter 3 considers campaigns for economic rights in the 1980s. I argue that economic injustice mobilized activists in the most deprived and violent areas of the city. However, as campaigners became focused on the relative deprivation of nationalists versus loyalists, an inclusive campaign for economic rights fractured, and a comprehensive critique of economic injustice failed to materialize. In Chapter 4 I examine the contradictory consequences of rights discourse as peace appeared possible during the 1990s. When ceasefires were established and, eventually, peace talks began, previously unthinkable discussions also took place among political opponents at the grassroots level. These efforts were justified and sustained by defenses of political rights to association. At the same time, however, rights to assembly fueled ongoing violent conflicts, creating bitterness that lingers more than a decade after the GFA. Chapter 5 moves into the post-GFA years to explore a significant lacuna of the settlement; that is, the GFA included no institutional provisions for systematically addressing past violence by either state or nonstate actors. Its lack of either an amnesty or a truth commission—that is, some official form of truth recovery—has been rapidly filled with discursive efforts to record history (such as community-based oral history projects), and selective accounts of the past have become a means of waging war in the theater of history. Chapter 6 shifts from the failures of rights discourse to consider local LGBT advocacy since the GFA. In contrast to the GFA’s shortcomings regarding past violence, the settlement presented gay rights activism with legal opportunities. Although the GFA rights language is focused on parity of esteem for “two traditions,” it provided tools that LGBT activists used to expand legal and social equality for LGBT persons. This unexpected consequence of the GFA’s human rights provisions hints at new possibilities for rights discourse to support both justice and reconciliation.

Chapter 7, “Ethnopolitics and Human Rights,” concludes the book with a return to history. I examine the Irish Enlightenment’s outcome, the bloody United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, in order to revisit debates about who is the subject of rights. To think critically about political subjectivity, the human subject of rights, and the GFA, I consider the fact that Irish campaigns for rights have repeatedly fractured along communal lines. Historically in Ireland, political actors outside the state have been profoundly influential. Yet political subjectivity has usually been mobilized for ethnopolitical projects that privilege certain subjects and restrict other dimensions of political subjectivity. State institutions, like those established by the GFA, may not always dictate political practice, but they can reflect, favor, and reproduce certain practices. As the LGBT case demonstrates, institutions may also create, or at least tolerate, spaces in which new political associations and subjects are mobilized.

The history here is not one of inevitable progress from rights violations to rights institutions or from violence to peace. Neither is it a simple critique of postconflict processes. Instead, it is a history of the ambiguities of rights discourse during conflict. It is also a history of how political actors in Northern Ireland embraced different conceptions of rights to conduct, conclude, and, in some ways, continue the conflict.

Appendix

Paramilitary Punishment Attacks (Shootings and Assaults) 1994–2011 1994–1995: 203 (PSNI 2004: 5)

1995–1996: 252 (PSNI 2004: 5)

1996–1997: 332 (PSNI 2004: 5)

1997–1998: 198 (PSNI 2004: 5)

1998–1999: 245 (PSNI 2004: 5)

1999–2000: 178 (PSNI 2004: 5)

2000–2001: 323 (PSNI 2004: 5)

2001–2002: 302 (PSNI 2004: 5)

2002–2003: 309 (PSNI 2004: 5)

2003–2004: 298 (PSNI 2004: 5)

2004–2005: 209 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2005–2006: 152 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2006–2007: 74 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2007–2008: 52 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2008–2009: 61 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2009–2010 (2010): 127 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2010–2011 (2011): 83 (PSNI 2012a: 5)

2011–2012 (2012): 79 (PSNI 2012a: 5)