Dr Maria Power teaches at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.
This edited volume of eleven essays, plus an introduction, is a useful contribution to a growing literature on aspects of the Northern Ireland peace process. Unlike many other studies which focus on the high level political negotiations and the process of institution building, this volume focuses on the role of varying sections of civil society in helping to consolidate the peace during a time of transition. The book thus contains essays that explore the role the of women's movement, churches, integrated education, loyalist groups and former prisoners as well as exploring the wider dimensions of the peace process with essays on the role external aid, cross border work as well as considering the limitations of the wider policy framework in which such groups have been working. Most of the essays take a sympathetic, but not uncritical, view of the work of civil society and collectively they seek to highlight the broad range of work that is often under-considered in the literature on societies moving away from armed conflict. To quote from Power's introduction 'Now that the political structures have been implemented, emphasis needs to be placed on relationships between communities and peacebuilding work focused on dealing with the sectarian divisions within society in required.' However, a number of papers in this volume highlight the difficulties of undertaking such work in the absence of political leadership and without a clear understanding of what such work is desired to achieve. As with many edited volumes, the essays vary in both quality and focus, which results in an uneven end product. One is left with a sense of a partial and fragmentary view of the role played by civil society but without a clear delineation of the larger framework or the greater whole. The predominant focus of the volume is the period since the ceasefires and the signing of the peace agreement (broadly since 1995-1998), but with a number of the papers taking theoretical or general perspectives on 'civil society' and two essays (on the work of the churches and the women's movement) taking a much longer perspective to sketch work undertaken from the early years of the conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there is limited concrete discussion of the actual range and type of work undertaken by civil society to help build peace. A concluding chapter that drew together some of the themes addressed by the different authors would have been a useful counterpart to the introductory scene-setting. Various papers discuss the role of government and international bodies in providing policy direction and support for the wider work on the ground, but they also highlight the lack of coherence among the political elite at both local and international level in developing a strategic framework for consolidating the peace, and even in having a real sense of what might need to be done once the framework for institutional reform was put in place. An example of this is the absence of any formal strategy for dealing with the presence of paramilitary groups beyond the demand for decommissioning of weapons. Although, as the chapters by Etchart and McEvoy & Shirlow discuss, some steps have been made from below, but this remains an unsteady and erratically supported process. This lack of any clear leadership, which continues in the absence of any formal policy by the devolved government, means that many grass roots groups simply had to adapt their practice to fit a regularly changing set of funding priorities and has in turn resulted in plethora of 'good practice' which has been developed through pilot schemes which are rarely transformed into mainstream activities. This in turn makes it difficult to effectively assess the actual impact of different sections of civil society in building the peace. The introductory chapter makes reference to the need for a clearer understanding of the concept of peacebuilding if there is to be a long term and sustainable peace. In this chapter Power highlights the importance of moving beyond the minimal conditions for peace, which is the ending of armed violence, to address the conditions that caused the conflict in the first place, and she notes that while political violence has largely been ended in Northern Ireland, the divisions between the two communities and the levels of inter-communal segregation remain high, and in some regards have increased over the last fifteen years. As one author asks - does this mean civil society peacebuilding has actually made some things worse? The problem is that different groups and sectors have different aspirations for the future of Northern Ireland and are following different route maps. Unfortunately the lack of coherence about what was needed and still needs to be done to build peace in Northern Ireland at a policy level, is reflected in the diversity of perspectives in the various chapters in the book. While a number of the authors use the term peacebuilding to frame their discussion few clarify their interpretation and understanding of it, and many also use other terms such as peace process, transition, conflict transformation and community relations as an alternative. Only Buchanan's chapter on policy frameworks has a clear discussion of the different theoretical approaches towards peacebuilding. She highlights the differing expectations underpinning terms such as conflict settlement, resolution and transformation and argues that only a programme of conflict transformation with horizontal and vertical relationships to promote fundamental social change will be able to address the root causes of the conflict. In contrast the absence of a coherent policy direction suggests that the political establishment are content with a more narrowly focused process of conflict settlement, involving the devolution of power but without any commitment to address the deeper social problems. Building peace is always a complex and unique process, while it is possible to share lessons and experiences, every society will to some extent need to reinvent the wheel to ensure that it fits the local context. This volume highlights some of progress made in building peace in Northern Ireland and also some of the weaknesses of the past long decade. It illustrates the importance of looking beyond the political elite in developing and implementing a programme of building peace after armed conflict, and implicitly confirms the need for long term commitment and perspective if the process of transition is to lead to a sustainable peace and a democratic society. The book constitutes a valuable contribution to scholarly debate on the role of civil society in conflict resolution, and a timely reminder that the hard work of building peace in Northern Ireland has only just begun... Hopefully, the insights of the authors will inform policies to support and enhance the grassroots peacebuilding work that, while often taken for granted, has not been insignificant. This volume highlights some of progress made in building peace in Northern Ireland and also some of the weaknesses of the past long decade. It illustrates the importance of looking beyond the political elite in developing and implementing a programme of building peace after armed conflict, and implicitly confirms the need for long term commitment and perspective if the process of transition is to lead to a sustainable peace and a democratic society. MARIA POWER'S edited collection Building Peace in Northern Ireland evaluates the contributions of the often anonymous advocates for peace at the grassroots. It at once highlights their key role and at the same time casts a critical eye over the political and financial infrastructure in which they operate. The book constitutes a valuable contribution to scholarly debate on the role of civil society in conflict resolution, and a timely reminder that the hard work of building peace in Northern Ireland has only just begun. Power, a lecturer in the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, has assembled a collection of twelve chapters by scholars working in a range of disciplines, covering a suitably wide range of topics: integrated education, the churches, women's activism, cross-border initiatives and more. In the book, peace-building is conceived of as a grassroots activity, defined as complementary to elite level political negotiations and compromises , such as those that produced the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, or the current governing arrangements at Stormont. As such, Building Peace in Northern Ireland builds on an expanding pool of scholarship that seeks to evaluate the role of civil society groups in conflict resolution-a topic of interest not just in Northern Ireland but internationally. This literature has emphasized the transformative effect that can be engendered by grassroots work: helping to change previously oppositional identities, facilitating intergroup cooperation through practical projects, and reintegrating ex-combatants into communities, to name just some of the possibilities. Power's book contains many such stories and examples: Kieran McEvoy and Pete Shirlow's chapter on politically motivated former prisoners is exemplary in this regard. But peace-building work is not without controversy or critics. In her introduction, Power acknowledges that Northern Ireland's peace and reconciliation "industry" has been criticized by academics and the media, reproducing a particularly biting quote from a 2010 edition of the Belfast News Letter (11): Northern Ireland's dirty little secret is that there is an entire tranche of the population , from euphemistic "community workers." to quangocrats pocketing hundred-thousand pay packets, who rely on Northern Ireland remaining different and on the distant shadow of the gunman and the occasional bomber and riot for their livelihood. The most enthusiastic advocates of civil society would doubtless be offended by the News Letter's sardonic evaluation. They might take some comfort that the chapters in the book challenge the News Letter's interpretation and provide evidence that this characterization does not tell the entire story. But the book also makes clear that the story of grassroots peacebuilding is not a fairy tale with an inevitably happy ending. Indeed, the main theoretical chapter, "Understanding the Role of Non-aligned Civil Society in Peacebuilding ," by Nicholas Acheson, Carl Milofsky and Maurice Stringer, presents a somewhat bleak and limited assessment of the role of civil society. They argue that civil society can be a "helpmeet to addressing what is essentially a political problem" and conclude that "The formation of new collective identities and forms of solidarity in civil society may be a necessary but can never be a sufficient condition for larger-scale change" (33). Timothy White's chapter, immediately following Acheson, Milofsky and Stringer, seems to see civil society as playing a potentially more transformative role-although White laments that in Northern Ireland this possibility is limited in part because of the way the Good Friday Agreement encourages people to think, act and vote in terms of "nationalist" and "unionist" blocs. These two chapters are the theoretical foundation for the volume and it would have been helpful had Power offered more editorial comment on them. For example, to what extent does she see the arguments of these chapters as complementary or contradictory? It may be the case that the differences in Acheson, Milofsky and Stringer's and White's chapters come down to having different criteria for "success" in peace-building. How such criteria are identified could also have been discussed more effectively throughout the book. It is somewhat disappointing that Power states in the introduction that "this collection does not aim to quantify the impact or effectiveness of this work" (14). But evaluation is a key issue in the field, and if it is to be avoided, more care should be taken to explain why. Yes, evaluating peace-building is not straightforward and standardized evaluation is all but impossible, but some sort of rigorous evaluation is necessary if civil society's potential contributions are to be maximized. The difficulties associated with how to evaluate grassroots peace-building are llustrated in Power's own chapter, "Providing a Prophetic Voice? Churches and Peacebuilding, 1968-2005." On the one hand, this chapter is a welcome corrective to much of the literature on the role of religion in Northern Ireland, which has tended to focus on Protestantism, because Power devotes much of her analysis to the role of leaders in the Catholic Church in "speaking out for peace." On the other hand, Power's conclusions about the effectiveness of "speaking out" are not always convincing. It is one thing for an academic to take seriously churches' denominational statements about peace, it is another thing to demonstrate that the "people in the pews" actually internalized these messages and, more importantly, acted on them. In fact, the weight of scholarship on the churches in Northern Ireland downplays the significance of statements by church leaders and denominations. It is a pity that Power was unable to engage with the analysis in John Brewer, Gareth Higgins and Francis Teeney's book, Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2011)-unpublished when Power's book went to press-which concludes that the work of the institutional churches has been inadequate. While I tend to agree with Brewer, Higgins and Teeney, my wider point here is that when scholars can draw such widely divergent conclusions about the effectiveness of a particular type of grassroots peacebuilding, it is clear that evaluating such work is not a simple task. Finally, the best analyses of grassroots peacebuilding focus on the connections between civil society and high level political actors. In the case of Northern Ireland, a volume edited by Christopher Farrington, Global Change, Civil Society and the Northern Ireland Peace Process: Implementing the Political Settlement (Palgrave, 2008) has set the standard in this regard, and happily this volume continues in this vein. Some of the strongest chapters are those which evaluate British, Irish, and European Union (EU) policies, especially their funding strategies. Of course, Northern Ireland has had the most heavily-funded peace process in the world, with its status as a region of the United Kingdom and its location in Western Europe meaning that it has drawn far more monetary resources than conflicts elsewhere (for a good comparative perspective on funding grassroots peacebuilding, see John Brewer's Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach, Polity, 2010). In light of this, chapters by Sandra Buchanan ("Examining the Peacebuilding Policy Framework of the Irish and British Governments"), Katy Hayward , Cathal McCall and Ivo Damkat ("Building Peace and Crossing Borders: The North/South Dimension of Reconciliation") and Elham Atashi ("The Role of External Aid in Peacebuilding") make for sobering reading. As Power puts it in her introduction, the authors of these chapters agree on a fundamental finding (13-14): "the governments (both British and Irish) lack the long-term commitment necessary to ensure that peacebuilding schemes achieve their aims and enable an improvement in relationships between communities in Northern Ireland." Among the specific problems identified in these chapters are that British, Irish and EU policies have been ad hoc and have lacked a wider vision about what they were trying to achieve; British and Irish policy makers did not assume enough responsibility for funding this type of work, relying instead on the EU; many examples of good practice are being lost as funding shrinks in the context of the "credit crunch"; funding schemes breed competition rather than cooperation among civil society groups; and the bureaucratic nature of funding schemes further marginalizes groups at interfaces and benefits the middle classes, who are better able to navigate all of the proverbial red tape. It is a credit to the editor and authors that Building Peace in Northern Ireland foregrounds these difficult issues. Hopefully, the insights of the authors will inform policies to support and enhance the grassroots peacebuilding work that, while often taken for granted, has not been insignificant.
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