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
