Colonization by Other Means: Consequences of Peace Agreements in Northern Ireland and Palestine
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COLONIZATION BY OTHER MEANS: CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE AGREEMENTS IN NORTHERN IRELAND AND PALESTINE A thesis submitted to the Kent State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for University Honors by Pádraigín O’Flynn May, 2019 Thesis written by Pádraigín O’Flynn Approved by ________________________________________________________________, Advisor ________________________________________, Chair, Department of Political Science Accepted by ___________________________________________________, Dean, Honors College ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………..iv CHAPTERS I. INTRODUCTION…………….………………………………………..…1 Historical Background………………………..……..…………………….6 Literature Review………………………………………………..……….19 II. WHY PEACE? WHY NOW? POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTS IN THE 1980s…………….…….……23 Northern Ireland………………………..……………..………………….23 Palestine………………………..………………………………..……….29 III. NEGOTIATIONS AND FINAL AGREEMENTS………………………34 Good Friday Agreement………………..……………………..………….34 Oslo Accords………………………..………………………...………….44 IV. TWENTY YEARS ON: PRESERVATION AND TRANSFORMATION……………...….……..59 Economic Inequalities…………………..……………………….……….59 Geographic Segregation………………..……………………..………….65 V. CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………..….……72 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………..…………75 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the efforts and support of a significant number of people. First and foremost, my advisor, Dr. Joshua Stacher, deserves the highest of thanks and praise. He has supported me endlessly throughout this whole process and has been the greatest mentor I could’ve possibly asked for over the course of my undergraduate career at Kent State. I also owe Dr. Lisa Bhungalia sincere thanks for both the opportunities and support which she has given me both for my thesis and my undergraduate education. She has been an incredible inspiration for me in the two years that I have known her. Dr. Timothy Scarnecchia and Dr. Suzy D’Enbeau, as members of my committee, have been valuable resources and supporters as well, both during and after my defense, and have provided invaluable perspectives that are integral to my thesis. I am deeply indebted to all of the faculty members, both within Kent State and across my discipline, who have been role models and mentors for me. Finally, I could not end this without expressing the deepest of gratitude to my parents for their constant love and encouragement. There is no way I would be on the path that I am without their support and all of the sacrifices they have made throughout my life in order to ensure I received the best possible education. My primary goal will always be to make them proud. iv 1 CHAPTER ONE Introduction A common practice in both international and interpersonal conflict resolution is to bring opposing parties to the table to negotiate their differences. This has become the goal for many international peace processes, and the global community praises such negotiations because they are seen as a step towards peace and conflict resolution through compromise. However, in practice, most peace talks fail to take into account the unequal power dynamics that inherently exist within any conflict – between governments and citizens, majorities and minorities, colonizers and colonized – despite the fact that this is a key component of conflict resolution theory.1 Bringing two parties to the table without addressing the power disparities between them only serves to perpetuate a relationship of inequality and normalize domination wherein one party maintains a systematic advantage over the other. Additionally, while both sides are expected to make concessions in peace negotiations, the starting point for these compromises almost always puts the oppressed party at a disadvantage. Peace talks have the ability to end physical violence, but they often fail to make participants and victims feel like the core grievances of the conflict are resolved, much less address structural inequalities. 1 Gregory M. Maney et al., “The Past's Promise: Lessons from Peace Processes in Northern Ireland and the Middle East,” Journal of Peace Research 43, no. 2 (2006), 182-183. 2 This thesis focuses on how peace processes not only preserve structures of settler colonial dominance, but also how such negotiations transform and deepen the preexisting socio-economic and political inequalities which harm the less powerful group. In particular, peace processes that fail to confront or change these power inequalities may stop or slow visible and violent attacks, but they also fail to produce a peace that leads to the conflicting parties practicing co-existence, intermingling, or exercising equal rights. These dynamics manifest in ways we can see. Peace processes that fail to address inherited settler colonial structures tend to increase wealth inequality and the geographic separation of the groups engaged in the conflict. The preservation of settler colonial power dynamics in the cases of Palestine2 and Northern Ireland3 is due in part to the involvement of the American and British empires in forcing the colonized people – Palestinians and Irish Catholics/Republicans – to negotiate their respective agreements from a point of weakness. This led to unjust agreements in both the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland as well as the Oslo Accords4 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the incremental effects of these two agreements continue today, despite the fact that the Good Friday Agreement is touted as the great success of the peace process era and the Oslo 2 For the purposes of this thesis, ‘Palestine’ refers to the entire territory of historic Palestine, not just occupied East Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. The areas occupied since 1967 will be referred to either individually or via the blanket term of ‘Occupied Territories.’ 3 Northern Ireland refers to the six northeastern counties of the province of Ulster which remain a part of the United Kingdom: Fermanagh, Tyrone, Down, Antrim, Derry, and Armagh. 4 The Oslo Accords are not an official peace agreement, but rather a Declaration of Principles and an Interim Agreement. However, for my purposes in this thesis, the Oslo Accords and Good Friday Agreement will be jointly referred to as ‘peace agreements’ due to the fact that my analysis is more focused on the processes leading to the final agreements and their aftermath rather than the technicalities and legalese of the documents themselves. 3 Accords are seen as its worst failure.5 The circumstances surrounding both processes were surprisingly similar and brought about the detrimental effects that persist to this day. I plan to show these negative effects of peace processing without addressing settler colonial structures in three substantial ways: the reinforcement of pre-existing settler colonial structures, growing wealth inequality, and geographic separation between the groups. The failure of peace processes to dismantle the settler colonial structures in both Northern Ireland and Palestine has transformed the tactics of British and Israeli settler colonialism, which was an outdated form of control on the brink of collapse, to a new reinvigorated form of political dominance that is more palatable to international liberal audiences. As a result, wealth inequality has continued to skyrocket while the physical separation of the oppressed group has reached new heights in the aftermath of both peace processes. All of this occurs as a result of peace processes that the world cheerleads as necessary to ending long-term conflicts, but which, in fact, alter the appearance of these conflicts rather than truly resolving them. Because of the publicized and outward success of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), its deleterious effects in Northern Ireland are ignored, silenced, or erased. People applaud the signing of agreement rather than focus on its ramifications or consequences. Though parties on both sides of the conflict reached an agreement, this does not mean that it was a truly beneficial agreement for all involved. The GFA did little to reconcile or reverse over 400 years of British settler colonialism in Ireland, and the economic and social inequalities which it maintained became repackaged and increased after the 5 Maney et al., “The Past’s Promise,” 188-193. 4 agreement was inked. The agreement did not decolonize6 the conflict because the settler colonial structures were not dismantled and the relationships between the conflicting parties were not altered. In fact, they got worse. The civil rights of the native Irish remain under attack, sectarian economic inequality continues to grow, and the British occupation of Northern Ireland was reinforced. The failure to dismantle these settler colonial structures remains the overarching limitation of the Good Friday Agreement, in that it created a false sense of peace and compromise without addressing the roots of power imbalances or producing a working peace between the parties. These failures are most visible in the sectarian nature of growing economic inequality and geographic separation. The outcome of GFA attacked the civil rights of the native Irish while also impoverishing them and segregating them into their sectarian grouping. The GFA’s outcome was to separate the conflicting parties rather than normalize relations between them. The Oslo Accords (1993-2000), on the other hand, are widely viewed as a peace processing failure. Their collapse in 2000 is relatively uncontested by scholars