Suchergebnisse

Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; List of tables; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Theoretical framework; A note on methods; Structure of the book; Note; 1 The EU and approaches to conflict resolution; Mechanisms of EU influence over conflicts; Foreign policy mechanisms; Conflict resolution through integration and association; The EU's conceptualisation of conflict resolution; Understanding conflict transformation; Approaches to institutional design in deeply divided societies; Consociationalism; Centripetalism; Power dividing

While ethno-national demography has featured significantly in political and scholarly debates about Northern Ireland, little attention has been paid to the politics of the Northern Ireland census itself. This article addresses this gap by exploring census politics since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It demonstrates that the border poll provision of the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit have increased the political salience of census results, with the 2021 census now being anticipated by many as a potential referendum trigger. Against this background, I argue that new census questions – on religious background and national identity – have had significant consequences for debates about the constitutional future. Introduced in order to satisfy requirements stemming partly from equalities legislation, an unintended consequence of the religious background question has been to reinforce 'two communities' narratives in constitutional debates, whereas the national identity question has served to problematise assumptions about relationships between identity and constitutional preferences.

AbstractBosnia and Herzegovina's first post‐war population census, held in 2013, was accompanied by campaigns associated with each of the country's three main ethnic groups, which sought to maximise their share of the recorded population. These campaigns were challenged by a rival 'civic' campaign that instead stressed the right to freedom of self‐identification, however. This article compares the aims, methods and framings used by this civic campaign with those of the most prominent of the 'ethnic' campaigns – that of Bosniak ethnic entrepreneurs. It demonstrates that the two campaigns were each motivated by a combination of symbolic motives, centred on recognition and highlighting discrimination, and instrumental motives relating to the country's power‐sharing institutions. The limited success of the civic campaign in countering the messages of its rival ethnic campaigns demonstrates the difficulties that civic movements face in mobilising citizens in consociational democracies such as BiH.

This article sets out to challenge a core assumption of much of the recent literature on the role of the European Union in conflict resolution, namely that the Union's approach aims at the transformation of conflicts over and above their management. It does so through an analysis of the EU's engagement with the process of constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Making use of discourse analysis of EU policy documents and speeches by key actors, supplemented by interviews with policy-makers in Brussels and in Bosnia, I argue that the EU's approach is based on the acceptance and attempted accommodation of distinct and antagonistic ethnic identities rather than any attempt at their transformation. While EU officials are highly critical of nationalist politicians in Bosnia and praise the efforts of civil society organisations that attempt to overcome ethnic divisions, they nonetheless view Bosnia through an 'ethnic conflict' paradigm that sees resistance to constitutional reform by nationalist elites as an inevitable symptom of deeper divisions in Bosnian society. Based on this reading, I conclude that EU conflict resolution policy is much more conservative than those stressing the Union's transformative power in conflict situations envisage. Adapted from the source document.