This is a collaborative project with our Scottish and community partners. It explores how disadvantaged and disengaged groups negotiate contentious political issues in contemporary Ireland. It explores whether and how the shared island initiative replaces, co-exists with or is intertwined with more contentious constitutional issues. The different views reflect wider theoretical debates about peace-building after protracted conflict. Some argue that reconciliation is a prerequisite to wider constitutional change; others that only structural change can stimulate rethinking and reconciliation.
Our project addresses these debates through close exploration of how diverse voices - not normally included in political debates but together a majority of the population - talk about the shared island.
In a first phase of research, we organise experimental ‘deliberative cafés’ to highlight shared and diverging problems and frustrations and how a shared island might answer these problems. We hope to make the events cumulative, so that the second ‘café’ can call on participants in the first (in person and through zoom),etc.
In a second phase of research, we explore how these grass-roots deliberations can be fed into policy-making.
In a third phase of research, we analyse the forms of interaction, reflexive discussion and deliberation in focus groups and interviews, comparing it with the modes of interaction and dialogue in our earlier research and in more conventional deliberative forums in Northern Ireland.
Thus we address in an empirically informed way the theoretical debates on forms of peace-building after protracted conflict and the policy debates on the ‘shared island’ initiative.
This project was funded by the Irish Research Council's New Foundations Scheme.