Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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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