Religion has regained political prominence in the twenty first century and not least for the manner in which it intersects with ethnicity. Many ethnic conflicts have a strong religious dimension, and religion appears as a powerful force for mobilisation, solidarity and violence. Religion and ethnicity can each act as a powerful base of identity, group formation and communal conflict. They can also overlap, with ethnic and religious boundaries coinciding, partially or completely, internally nested or intersecting. This volume maps the different forms of intersection: cases where religion is prioritised in private life and ethnicity in public, where each coexists in tension in political life, and where the distinctions reinforce each other with dynamic effects. It maps the different patterns with case studies and comparisons from Ireland, Northern Ireland, France, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Malaysia. It shows how ordinary people construct their solidarities and identities using both ethnic and religious resources. This opens up analysis of the socially transformative, as well as politically antagonistic, potential of religion in situations of ethnic division. This book was published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Religion has regained political prominence in the twenty first century and not least for the manner in which it intersects with ethnicity. Many ethnic conflicts have a strong religious dimension, and religion appears as a powerful force for mobilisation, solidarity and violence. Religion and ethnicity can each act as a powerful base of identity, group formation and communal conflict. They can also overlap, with ethnic and religious boundaries coinciding, partially or completely, internally nested or intersecting. This volume maps the different forms of intersection: cases where religion is prioritised in private life and ethnicity in public, where each coexists in tension in political life, and where the distinctions reinforce each other with dynamic effects. It maps the different patterns with case studies and comparisons from Ireland, Northern Ireland, France, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Malaysia. It shows how ordinary people construct their solidarities and identities using both ethnic and religious resources. This opens up analysis of the socially transformative, as well as politically antagonistic, potential of religion in situations of ethnic division. This book was published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

This book provides a comprehensive and original interpretation of the Northern Ireland conflict. It situates the conflict firmly in its Irish, British and wider international contexts, showing how the sharp conflicts of interest are generated by deep-set structures and relations within Britain and Ireland. The authors argue that only a systematic and determined policy on the part of the British and Irish governments to dismantle the system of relations that produces conflict can fulfill the potential of the peace process and allow an agreed political settlement to emerge.

Much attention has been paid to globalization, yet little has been focused on the relationship between the national and sub-national levels of politics. This publication has separate sections on the state in transition; on regionalism, nationalism and separatism; and on the security forces and the maintenance of order. The three states chosen - Britain, France and Spain - have historical similarities as ex-imperial, Atlantic seaboard states with weighty historical and institutional traditions. But they also differ in their institutions, in their centre-periphery relations and in their varying responses to the new phase of change. The authors assess the new constitutional configurations in each state - decentralisation, devolution or autonomous governments - and analyse the effect on the peripheries and the maintenance of order. The book also includes chapters on conflict in Northern Ireland and the Spanish Basque country and discussion of nationalist identity and assertion in the three countries.

The contributors to this volume show that the themes of empire, colony, and national liberation movements can be addressed in a European continental as much as in Asian, Latin American, or African contexts. There is a further benefit from a within-Europe comparison: It calls into question the tendency to assume fundamental differences between "western" and "eastern" Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a "western" nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an "eastern" one, defined as ethnic. It also answers the question whether intra-European comparison of this kind is possible, in a context where post-Soviet scholarship is often invisible in Anglo-American scholarship. As Norman Davies reminds us, low public awareness of Europe's smaller and, in west-European minds, "more distant" nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like "that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward."

This timely collection of essays examines the impact of the historic Good Friday Agreement, which all parties are still debating, and offers a theoretical understanding of the processes and forces at work in making and implementing the Agreement. The authors analyze the changes in Northern Ireland that were produced and have followed from the Agreement. The complete text of the Agreement is included.