Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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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