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After three decades of violence, Northern Ireland has experienced unprecedented peace. This book examines the impact of the 1998 Agreement which halted the violence on those most affected by it – the Northern Ireland people themselves. Using public opinion surveys conducted over half a century, this book covers changes in public opinion across all areas of society and politics, including elections, education, community relations and national identity. The surveys show that despite peace, Protestants and Catholics remain as deeply divided as ever. The vast majority marry co-religionists, attend religious schools and have few friends across the religious divide. The results have implications not just for peace-making in Northern Ireland, but for other societies emerging from conflict. The main lesson of peace-making in Northern Ireland is that political reform has to be accompanied by social change across the society as a whole. Peace after conflict needs social as well as political change.
This is a wide-ranging analysis of the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism between the outbreak of ‘the Troubles’ in 1969 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Engaging a vast array of hitherto unused primary sources alongside original and re-used oral history interviews, ‘The Age-Old Struggle’ draws upon the words and writings of more than 250 Irish republicans. This book scrutinises the movement's historical and contemporary complexity, the variety of influences within Irish republicanism, and divergent republican responses at pivotal moments in the conflict. Yet it also assesses the centripetal forces which connected republican organisations through decades of struggle. Acro...
This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.
This bibliography lists the most important works published in sociology in 1993. Renowned for its international coverage and rigorous selection procedures, the IBSS provides researchers and librarians with the most comprehensive and scholarly bibliographic service available in the social sciences. The IBSS is compiled by the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, one of the world's leading social science institutions. Published annually, the IBSS is available in four subject areas: anthropology, economics, political science and sociology.
Mass attachment to religion is rapidly declining in most of the world; Why, and What comes next?The world is becoming less religious. Since 2007, there has been a pervasive decline in religious belief and most of the world's people now say that God is less important in their lives than they said He was in the quarter century before 2007. The American public showed the most dramatic shift of all. The United States, which for many years stood as a highly religious outlier among the world's high-income countries, now ranks as the 12th least religious country for which data are available. Many factors contributed to this dramatic worldwide shift, but as Inglehart shows, certain ones stand out. F...
Do gender quota laws – policies that mandate women's inclusion on parties' candidate slates – affect policy outcomes? Making Gender Salient tackles this crucial question by offering a new theory to understand when and how gender quota laws impact policy. Drawing on cross-national data from high-income democracies and a mixed-methods research design, the book argues that quotas lead to policy change for issues characterized by a gender gap in preferences, especially if these issues deviate from the usual left/right party policy divide. The book focuses on one such issue, work-family policies, and finds that quotas shift work-family policies in the direction of gender equality. Substantive chapters show that quotas make gender more salient by giving women louder voices within parties, providing access to powerful ministerial roles, and encouraging male party leaders to compete on previously marginalized issues. The book concludes that quotas are one important way of facilitating congruence between women's policy preferences and actual policy outcomes.
This book explores how the construction and contestation of victims in societies emerging from conflict impact processes of peacebuilding. It locates its inquiry in Northern Ireland where highly politicized, unresolved narratives of violence and a so-called ‘hierarchy of victims’ illuminate inherent paradoxes of victimhood in intergroup conflict. The author critiques how mechanisms designed to address the legacy of conflict often reify exclusive ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ identities and obscure complex harm. Adopting an interdisciplinary lens, the book examines how the image of the ideal victim interacts with intergroup processes in a polarizing and intractable victim-perpetrator paradigm. The analysis of these issues in Northern Ireland suggests that exclusive policies and mechanisms reinforce rather than repair societal divisions, and that inclusive, complex approaches to victimhood are necessary to build sustainable peace. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of peace studies, transitional justice and criminology.
This collection explores how Christian individuals and institutions – whether Churches, church-related organisations, clergy, or lay thinkers – combined the topics of faith and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. "National identity" is understood in a broad sense that includes discourses of citizenship, narratives of cultural or linguistic belonging, or attributions of distinct, "national" characteristics. The collection addresses Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox perspectives, considers various geographical contexts, and takes into account processes of cross-national exchange and transfer. It shows how national and denominational identities were often mutually constitutive, ...
In this book Ian Shapiro develops and extends arguments that have established him as one of today's leading democratic theorists. Shapiro is hardheaded about the realities of politics and power, and the difficulties of fighting injustice and oppression. Yet he makes a compelling case that democracy's legitimacy depends on pressing it into the service of resisting domination, and that democratic theorists must rise to the occasion of fashioning the necessary tools. That vital agenda motivates the arguments of this book. Tracing modern democracy's roots to John Locke and the American founders, Shapiro shows that they saw more deeply into the dynamics of democratic politics than have many of th...