This week we ask "what have been the legacies of conflict in Northern Ireland?"
In 1998, after three decades of conflict, lasting peace was achieved in Northern Ireland through an accord variously known as the Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement. The 25th anniversary of that Agreement comes next month.
Though there are problems – the institutions of power-sharing government established through the Agreement are currently suspended, and pockets of paramilitary violence remain – the settlement reached a quarter of a century ago has been strikingly successful in its central aim: conflict has not returned; and contestation over Northern Ireland’s constitutional future is now conducted solely by political means. People in Northern Ireland have lived in much greater freedom and security as a result. For most people, life has got much better.
Nevertheless, 30 years of conflict were always going to leave lasting legacies that would take time to heal. And research conducted in part here in UCL is exploring those legacies and comparing them with patterns found in other post-conflict societies around the world.
This week we are joined by Professor Kristin Bakke and Dr Kit Rickard.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
northern ireland, conflict, paramilitary, communities, referendum, organisations, areas, brexit, counterinsurgency, kristin, people, informants, ucl, kit, ireland, state, brexit referendum, paramilitary groups, border, survey
SPEAKERS
Alan Renwick, Kristin Bakke, Kit Rickard
Alan Renwick 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics and this week we ask: what have been the legacies of conflict in Northern Ireland?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
In 1998, after three decades of conflict, lasting peace was achieved in Northern Ireland through an accord variously known as the Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement. The 25th anniversary of that Agreement comes next month.
Though there are problems – the institutions of power-sharing government established through the Agreement are currently suspended and pockets of paramilitary violence remain – the settlement reached a quarter of a century ago has been strikingly successful in its central aim: conflict has not returned, and contestation over Northern Ireland's constitutional future is now conducted solely by political means. People in Northern Ireland have lived in much greater freedom and security as a result. For most people, life has got much better.
Nevertheless, 30 years of conflict were always going to leave lasting legacies that would take time to heal. And research conducted in part here in UCL is exploring those legacies and comparing them with patterns found in other post-conflict societies around the world.
Two key members of the research team are Kristin Bakke, who is Professor in Political Science and International Relations in the UCL Department of Political Science and leads our Conflict and Change research cluster, and who is also associated with the Peace Research Institute Oslo. And Kit Rickard, who completed his PhD in the UCL Department of Political Science last year and who is now a research associate at the United Nations University in Helsinki.
And I'm delighted that Kristin and Kit both join me now.
Welcome both of you to UCL Uncovering Politics.
And we're going to focus in during our conversation on two particular papers that you've recently published. But could we maybe begin by getting a sense of the broader project that these papers are part of: what questions are you asking in this work and where did those questions come from? Maybe Kristin you could start us off.
Kristin Bakke 02:29
Yeah, thank you, Alan. And thank you for having us.
So our work on and in Northern Ireland is part of two large research projects with colleagues at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. As part of this project, we – and I should sort of emphasise that when I say 'we', there are different sort of sets of authors here – we have explored different questions that in different ways get at the long-term legacies of violence and violent orders, including norms, on ordinary people's attitudes. This is something I've been interested in throughout my career in different contexts. And in 2015-16, I started looking at that closer to home.
And we've examined this, or there are several things I've examined.
So the first thing we started examining was in work with Karin Dyrstad and Helga Binningsbo: what people think about the various provisions in the Good Friday Agreement more than 20 years on. And we tried to figure out how people's experiences of the conflict itself – so the conflict often referred to as 'The Troubles' – have shaped their views of the peace agreement. And then we looked at how people's perceptions of the peace agreement and their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with implementation have shaped their faith in political authorities in Northern Ireland. And all of this work has been done in a comparative context, looking at Northern Ireland as one of three so-called 'post-conflict cases'. So we compared it with Guatemala and Nepal, based on nationally representative surveys in these different places.
And then in one of the articles we're going to talk about today, we've looked at how the Brexit referendum activated certain conflict narratives in Northern Ireland.
Then Kit and I have examined the continued social control that paramilitary groups still hold in certain areas of Northern Ireland. And we've spoken to you in a previous episode of this podcast about some of that work. And we'll talk about some new work in that vein today.
And one of the things we've done since the last time we spoke to you is to continue... Sorry. One of the things we've done since the last time we spoke to you is to conduct another public opinion survey, specifically honing in on areas that are controlled by paramilitary groups, to get a sense of what people think of these violent actors that are still around, you know, many years after the conflict officially came to an end. And then yesterday evening we learned that we have gotten the new grant, Kit and I with our colleague Sigrid Weber here in the Department, to look at parading in Northern Ireland.
So there's a range of questions in this project that all have to do with sort of longer-term legacies of violence, violent conflict, and also violent orders that emerged during conflicts.
Alan Renwick 05:23
Well congratulations on that news on the new grant. It's always wonderful when you get a new opportunity to analyse another question.
You talked there about conflict in Northern Ireland and comparing the conflict in Northern Ireland with what happens elsewhere as well. Do you want to say a little bit more about the nature of the conflict that took place in Northern Ireland and how that compares with what you see in other places?
Kristin Bakke 05:48
Yeah, so just first, a little bit about the nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland. And I guess most people who are listening to this in the UK will know about this. But, you know, The Troubles – as this conflict is known, certainly in the UK – was an armed conflict over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, fuelled by socioeconomic inequalities between the two dominant communities in Northern Ireland, the Protestant and the Catholic communities, and also fuelled by the state's use of repression.
And you had roughly two sides. So you had, backed by the British Army, you had the Protestant community, sort of politically referred to as the Unionists. And then the paramilitary groups on that side are referred to as Loyalists. They wanted to remain part of the UK, while the Catholic community and the sort of the political organisations – they're referred to as Nationalist organisations, the paramilitary group as Republican groups – sought Irish reunification.
And this was a 30-year long conflict. So a very long conflict. It came to an end with the Good Friday Agreement, as you said in your introduction, in 1998.
And in many ways, this is a success story, right? Well, the Agreement has been a success in the sense that the conflict, there hasn't been a resurgence of the armed conflict with sort of ongoing, you know, fighting between the various sides. You still have paramilitary groups around; there has, you know, even in the last few years, been sort of violent uprisings. So, as in many post-conflict societies, I guess, we should think of it as post conflict, sometimes, in quotation marks.
Alan Renwick 07:31
it's very useful to have that reminder. And we will bear that in mind in our conversation here.
Kit, do you want to take us through this paper a little bit and just explain what it is that you're asking, first of all, and why this is an interesting question – where the question comes from. And then we'll get into what you've done and what you find.
So let's move on to the first of the two papers that we're going to be talking about. And this one is a working paper that you published just a few months ago that examines levels of trust within neighbourhoods within Northern Ireland, and how patterns in trust today are influenced by what happened during the period of The Troubles and particularly the tactics of the British government during The Troubles.
Kit Rickard 08:14
Yeah, absolutely.
So the title of the paper is ''Ten pound touts': post-conflict trust and the legacy of counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland'. A tout is a very colloquial term used in Northern Ireland to refer to an informer or collaborator. So it's something... no one really wants to be called a tout in Northern Ireland. A ten pound tout refers to the fact that the British military, the secret services, they would pay informants in certain neighbourhoods to provide information on the whereabouts, the identities of people that they thought were members of parliamentary organisations.
The bigger question where this fits in is we're really interested in the legacies of what I think of are institutions that are set up during the conflict. So if we think of counterinsurgency as a strategy – or a bundle of strategies – that the state can adopt in order to undermine, ultimately identify, eliminate armed actors, we think that those strategies can have institutional impacts. And generally, when we think of institutions, we can think of those that are formal. So when I say health institution, we think of an organisation with an emblem, a logo and all this.
But we can also think of informal institutions that are the kind of social norms, practices, that are stigmas that basically regulate how you live your life. And so in this case, we're really interested in the types of informal institutions that emerged in areas that were affected most by counterinsurgency strategies and how they persist and ultimately impact trust levels during the conflict and, in our case, over two decades after the conflict.
Alan Renwick 10:10
So in particular you're looking at the idea that if a community was subject to heavy pressure from the British state to inform, if there was a suspicion that there were many informants in that community, then that may have kind of harmed trust within that community. And that may still be the case several decades later. That's the core idea here, is it?
Kit Rickard 10:33
And I think, just to add a bit of nuance, it's not necessarily that trust, once it's broken, it never comes back. It's that it remains broken because those norms persist, right? So you have your initial effect on trust – that could be related to the conflict. But generally, you know, communities can rebuild trust. But in these instances, because of the persistence of the norms against collaborating, against being seen as a tout, the stigma of being seen as someone who's informing against a community – that leads to persistent low levels of local trust.
Alan Renwick 11:12
Kristin, do you want to come in?
Kristin Bakke 11:13
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that when... So Kit and I were doing interviews in Northern Ireland in 2018, and one of the things we would hear people say in certain communities was this idea that you wouldn't want to be seen as a tout or seen as an informer. So really sort of showing the persistence of this norm.
Kit Rickard 11:35
Yeah. So as Kristin was saying, we fielded surveys in Northern Ireland in areas that are controlled by paramilitaries. So when we say 'are controlled by paramilitaries', what we mean there are areas that have experienced high levels of paramilitary-style attacks. One of the legacies of the conflict – and is something that Kristin and I have written about in the past, and we discussed on this podcast in the past – was that in certain communities, there is a persistence of what is colloquially known as in Northern Ireland as 'punishment attacks'. So during the conflict, in certain areas, the police and the army couldn't provide everyday policing. And so paramilitaries set up these informal institutions – justice institutions – where they would provide some very brutal forms of justice. That occurred really because there was no police presence during the conflict. In the post-conflict period, the police started to reintegrate these areas. These areas are, you know – bridges are being built with the police if you like. But there are still areas that are affected by high levels – but I would say are quite high levels – of paramilitary funds.
And so we fielded a survey in 2022, in 16 areas where there was high level of paramilitary violence between 2008 and 2018. And the idea there is to look at places where there were paramilitary structures during the conflict and where there probably still are today.
The nice – I shouldn't say a nice – thing. But generally to understand how counterinsurgency strategies affect communities, it's really difficult because those communities that counterinsurgency strategies are used to target are very different to other communities. Right? So it's very hard to get like a valid comparative group.
Because the Northern Irish conflict, you had low police presence in both areas controlled by Republican groups and Loyalist groups, but that the counterinsurgency targeted predominantly Catholic areas controlled by Republican groups, we argue, and we note, of course, there are huge differences between predominantly Catholic Republican areas of Belfast and Derry compared to predominantly Protestant Loyalist areas of Belfast and Colerain. But in a sense, we kind of assume because the lives of people who lived in those areas were probably very similar during the conflict, we say that the key difference between those areas is that one was targeted by counterinsurgency and the other was not.
And the type of counterinsurgency really matters. So people who know the Northern Irish context and the conflict will say, 'well, we had huge informants on both sides of the conflict', and that is true. They're ‘super grass’ informers. These are members of paramilitary organisations that turned to the state and informed on who were part of the groups and identified which operations they're a part of. And that happened on both sides in paramilitary organisations that are Republican ones and Loyalist ones.
The real difference, and importantly for our argument, is that it's in Republican areas that the British secret services and the British Army recruited informants, and they did so extensively. They used informants a lot – low level informants. This is where the term a 'ten pound tout' comes from – the idea that someone who was just arrested for loitering or antisocial behaviour might be turned informant. And that's where the real strong stigma comes from, being that kind of informant. Of course, there is a stigma against all informants after conflict, but that is a very, very strong one.
And so we ultimately compare levels of trust in Republican areas and Loyalist areas, or areas predominately Catholic, predominantly Protestant. And we find that in areas that are predominately Catholic trust is much lower – local trust. But not other forms of trust, really: do you trust people in your neighbourhood? That's very, very low.
And then to get closer at the mechanism, we also ask people: to what extent do you agree with this statement, 'people do not go to the police because they're scared to be seen as informants'. The difference is really big, right? So in Catholic areas – predominately Catholic areas – people are much more likely to agree with that statement than in predominantly Protestant areas.
And so we take our evidence from our survey. We also draw on other research that shows the persistence and norms around informing and how that undermines the police policing in these areas or access or how often people go to the police. And that's the evidence that we bring to bear.
Alan Renwick 16:00
So potentially, we have a really important implication here, that the activities that the British state engaged in all these decades ago shaped norms of how people think of the state and how people think of interacting with at least the police part of the state. And that remains the case today. So that is a real legacy that has survived over an extended period.
I mean, I guess the key question that we need to think about as political scientists in considering this is: well, can we be absolutely confident that the mechanism that is working is the mechanism that you say is working? So can we be absolutely confident that it is the past practice of counterinsurgency from the state and the recruitment of informants that has led to low trust – low local levels of trust – in Catholic areas? Or, you know, is there maybe just something else going on that differentiates Catholic areas from Protestant areas?
Kit Rickard 16:55
I think that that is absolutely the main concern that we should have as political scientists. And what we try and do in this paper is: first we try and think of what those main alternative arguments could be. Right? So a classic one would be that, well, people in predominantly Catholic areas, they actually suffered more from the conflict, right – they actually experienced more conflict or they know more people who were affected by the conflict.
And so there are certain alternative arguments. This one, for instance, that we can kind of control for in our regression or statistical analysis. There are other ones which are really hard to control for, and all we can do with those ones is bring more evidence to the table to try and identify that mechanism.
But I would say with these big questions that we care so much about, you know, it's hard to get a clean identification of what we think is the main mechanism. All we can do is bring what we have as political scientists, all the best tools we have, to the question, and ultimately draw our conclusion based on the evidence that we can muster.
I think the conclusion we draw is it's very unlikely that it's something else going on. I think when you are given an overview of the importance of the project, it's true that trust in the state matters. But here we're not interested in trust in the state. We're interested in trust in each other, which is really kind of a different mechanism. It has different implications because we know that people in both areas have problems trusting the state in Northern Ireland, the police and the army. I think the implications are really damning or they're very difficult for especially predominately Catholic neighbourhoods.
Alan Renwick 18:32
That's very interesting. Thank you. Kristin, do you want to come in on that?
Kristin Bakke 18:35
Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on what Kit said about, you know, we try to bring as much evidence as we can to the table. And I feel like we've in this project, we've done this in different ways: we looked a lot at secondary and historical sources, Kit has spent time in archives, we went and did interviews.
We had this unique opportunity to do two surveys, which is unique in the sense that it costs a lot of money to do surveys. And there were different projects. And we worked on one survey that we conducted in 2016. And then, you know, based on the work on that there were other questions, you know, emerging, and like how can we really get at that? And we, you know, we had the opportunity to do another round of surveys and could try to design it in a different way that allowed us to get at, you know, those questions that you're raising about, you know, how can we really know that that's going on? So I think we really tried to bring a wealth of evidence to these questions that we had.
Alan Renwick 19:27
Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely there in the paper. It's wonderful reading the paper – the amount of detail that there is in there is just fascinating.
Let's move on to the second paper that we're going to be talking about today, which is a journal article published last year. And this is on how people remember the period of conflict in Northern Ireland and, in particular, how those memories may have been affected by a much later event, the Brexit referendum in 2016. And also we look here at the impact of the Brexit referendum also on attitudes towards whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or become part of the United Ireland.
Kristin, do you want to take us through where this paper came from and how you got interested in these questions?
Kristin Bakke 20:11
Okay, thank you, Alan.
In the project, you know, we're interested in the referendum. And of course, you know, as we all know, that the referendum led to lots of heated debates in the UK and particularly in Northern Ireland. And in Northern Ireland, many feared that Brexit would bring about a potential hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and that that could kind of bring back The Troubles. And a key provision in the Good Friday Agreement was about cross-border cooperation on the island of Ireland, which was based on the fact that both the UK and Ireland were members of the European Union. So it's not surprising that people wonder whether leaving the EU would jeopardise political stability and the peace process in Northern Ireland.
And, you know, we know now that these concerns were not entirely unfounded. But whereas the worry had – perhaps initially and certainly in the campaign – been about, you know, the reactions in a nationalist community if there were to be a hard border, the main grievance we've seen later on – which today has stifled politics and, you know, since the referendum has stifled politics in Northern Ireland – has been grievances in the Unionist community. So while the Brexit negotiations avoided a hard border on the island of Ireland, once Brexit officially came into effect, the resulting border in the Irish Sea fuelled tensions and you know, even riots and either tensions or grievances on the part of the Unionist community.
So we have this... This is from, sort of, the first survey that we did. So in the paper, we draw on a unique research opportunity, which is that we conducted a survey in Northern Ireland between May and July 2016, and Brexit, the referendum, happened in the middle. So we have a setup that allows us to look at people's attitudes in the run up to and then the immediate aftermath of the referendum. What we can do then is that we can look at how the referendum and the referendum campaign affected people's views on The Troubles and their preferences for Northern Ireland's future constitutional status, because these were things we were asking questions about in the survey. So that's what we're doing in this paper.
And the main thing going on, we argue, is that political campaigns, such as the one leading up to the Brexit referendum, might change people's information environment, which in turn can draw their attention to and increase the salience of certain issues. It kind of primes them to think of certain issues. And by bringing up The Troubles again, the campaign might have activated people's memories of the past in general or incentivised a resurgence of specific conflict narratives, such as the border issues or the border on the island of Ireland. So that's the main thing we think could be going on here and that we're interested in looking at.
It might, of course, also be that when people woke up the day after the referendum, the prospect of leaving the EU, which until then had been hypothetical, was a reality. You know, there might have been this intense feeling of uncertainty about what does this mean, you know, for the economics of Northern Ireland. And there might also have been a sense that, well, we're really worried about this in Northern Ireland, but the rest of the UK might not care so much. There might have been this sense of, you know, perhaps a sense of neglect.
So those are other mechanisms that could be going on, but we think it's mainly this priming thing going on – that, you know, the campaign itself and Brexit sort of brought up issues related to the conflict. So that's what we want to try to look at in this paper by comparing people who were interviewed before and after June 23 2016.
Alan Renwick 23:31
And how did you investigate that?
Kristin Bakke 23:32
So to get at people's views on the conflict's causes, we asked the question which said: 'people have different views on what caused the troubles. I will now read a few statements about possible causes or reasons for the conflict and I would like you to tell me how important you think each of them was.' And the statement then contains political, economic, actor-base and constitutional causes of the conflict. So you know, we asked them whether they thought it was about lack of democracy, discrimination and repression, community-based inequality, economic inequality and poverty, partition of Ireland, illegitimate rule from Westminster. We also asked whether they thought it was due to extremist Loyalists or extremist Republicans. So those are all the sort of pre-populated reasons that we had given people, and they could choose from those reasons when we asked them what was the conflict about. So that was the first sort of outcome variable we were interested in – to see, you know, you know, are there some of those that came... Well, first of all, were all of these, you know, heightened? But are there some that were heightened more than others in particular is what we're interested in looking at.
And then to get at people's preference for the political future of Northern Ireland, we asked the question which says: 'if the UK leaves the EU, do you think Northern Ireland should: one, remain part of the UK; two, become an independent state, or; three, unify with the rest of Ireland. So that's the second outcome variable that we're looking at.
So we have those two outcome variables, and then we want to explore the impact of the Brexit campaign and its outcome. And we use the day of the referendum to split our sample in two. So we have those who are interviewed before the referendum, including the day of the referendum, who are sort of the control group. And then we have the treatment group, and that's the people who were interviewed after the results of the referendum were known. So this comes close to, you know, what we can think of as a natural experiment.
The key expectation we have is that if Brexit activated people's memory of the past, we could expect the conflict and its root causes to be more prominent after June 23 2016. But given the salience of the border issue and the possibility of a hard border, which was very salient in the campaign itself, it's also plausible that it's only the island issue that becomes more accessible in people's minds.
Alan Renwick 25:48
And the crucial question, of course, is what did you find?
Kristin Bakke 25:51
So we found that respondents who were interviewed after the referendum were more likely to indicate that, you know, of all those reasons that we gave them that the conflict could be about, they were more likely to say illegitimate rule from Westminster and the partition of Ireland as causes that underpinned The Troubles. So we see this as evidence for what we can think of as issue priming related to constitutional status and the border, rather than evidence for a more general activation of conflict narratives. So that's the first key finding.
The second key finding is that the referendum seems to have changed people's preferences for Northern Ireland's political future. So the share of respondents who preferred reunification with Ireland increased by about nine percentage points when it became clear that the UK would leave the EU. Though it's still a minority position, but it increased, while the share of respondents who wanted to stay in the UK fell by about 13 percentage points. So that's the key findings.
We also tried to figure out if it was the campaign or the outcome itself that had these effects. And by 'we' here, I mean, the painstaking work by my co-author, Amelie, by plotting people's attitudes during the campaign. So how that was happening, how people's attitudes might have changed during the campaign. So remembering we were serving from May, from about mid May. And based on this analysis, we think it is the priming that occurred during the campaign, rather than the actual sort of result – the uncertainty that came with that – that led to these shifts in attitudes.
Alan Renwick 27:23
And this is fascinating to me as someone who's worked on referendums, because referendums are sometimes touted as things that can help kind of resolve conflicts and overcome difference and settle issues. Whereas something that we've seen in discussions in the UK following both the Scottish independence referendum and also the Brexit referendum is concern that referendums do completely the opposite of that: actually, they intensify conflicts and they make people aware of divisions and differences that perhaps were rather under the surface previously.
And it's striking that you seem to be finding something quite similar happening in the kind of Northern Ireland microcosm, if you like, within the Brexit referendum – that UK-wide we might be getting this conflict arising over Brexit and lots of culture wars issues, and all of that kind of thing; but in Northern Ireland, you're finding that the referendum is getting people thinking back into the territory of, you know, are we on this side or are we on that side?
People often say that one of the great achievements of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement was that it reduced the importance of the border on the island of Ireland. And although there was still that border, it became much less present in people's everyday lives – less effect on people's lives. But the referendum campaign in itself was getting people thinking again about, gosh, are we on this side of the border or are we on that side? And what are the differences to our lives that are going to be created by that? So it's a very, very striking finding that kind of fits in with an emerging thought that we have in our understanding of referendums that maybe they're not always as benign as perhaps previously they had been imagined to be.
Kristin Bakke 29:03
Yeah, absolutely. And when we were writing this, I mean, we were, you know, reading your work and you know, what you've been saying about referendums here. That, you know, this is an area where I think there isn't that much work on what referendums do to attitudes. And you know, this work and the work you've done suggest that this is, you know, an area where we really should sort of try to figure out more what is going on here – what do referendums do to, you know, to public opinion, particularly when they sort of increase the salience of contentious issues?
Alan Renwick 29:35
No, I think that's definitely the case.
Good. We could happily talk about that for quite a long time, but we'd better not.
Just before we draw this conversation to a close, it would be interesting to hear what more is coming from this project. You've talked about the fact that you have quite a wide project that has several surveys, has qualitative work with interviews that you're doing with people. You're also drawing on various other data sources in order to do some of this analysis. What are some of the other questions that you were hoping also to explore in this project? Kristin, do you want to start and then maybe Kit can come in as well.
Kristin Bakke 30:09
Kit and I are at the moment working on one other paper, which is really about trying to look in-depth into what is it that underpins the kind of social control that paramilitary groups seem to have in certain areas in Northern Ireland. In past work, we've looked at how there's a persistence in where paramilitary groups are active from The Troubles, from the conflict, until the present. And in the current work we're doing, tapping into that survey that Kit was describing earlier, we're trying to figure out whether, you know, what do people really think about these actors? Do they have local legitimacy in these communities or is this kind of social control they seem to have based on coercion? And we know that, you know, they can only have and operate in certain communities if there is some demand for the kind of order that they're providing. But what do people in general think in these communities? So that's one of the things we're working on.
Kit Rickard 31:13
Yeah. For the project on the kind of nature of the relationship between the paramilitaries and those communities today, I think it actually feeds really nicely into this conversation about what we should call paramilitary actors – like, the legitimising role of words that we use to describe different actors and different constellations.
And I think in Northern Ireland there's a big debate about how much support do paramilitary actors actually have. Do communities turn to paramilitary actors when they have a problem? Are they seen as legitimate local representatives of these communities? And that, I think, really gets to the core of: what should we call these paramilitary organisations? Because people who don't agree that they have any demand, that there is any demand or that they are legitimate, very often – and we were told this in interviews in Northern Ireland with people who were more or less affiliated with paramilitary organisations – they've always been calling us micro criminal organisations. So the thing is, if you don't have any demand, if you're not legitimate in the community, then you're a criminal organisation. I think that's really what I'm really interested in – is the relationship between those actors and the community.
And then another avenue that we're potentially interested in is looking at the role of community practices. So things like parading, things like murals, and how that allows intergroup divisions to persist or not, potentially.
And then finally – and Kristin alluded to this – is the role of these kind of grey organisations that emerged to act as bridges between the community and the police. So in a lot of neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland, people are reluctant to go to the police and former paramilitaries often established these restorative justice organisations, which basically they coordinate between the community, the paramilitary actors and the police. Some of them receive funding from the state. So these are legitimate organisations. And some of them are not funded by the state and they work, let's say, closer to paramilitaries and not as close to the police. And some of them are closer to the police. And I'm really interested in that as an era of ongoing contestation between paramilitaries, community and state, and what that means actually for people's lives in in these communities.
Alan Renwick 33:43
One final, final question: are there key messages that you think policymakers should hear from the research that you've done so far and maybe the research that you'll do in the future as well?
Kit Rickard 33:54
I think there are potentially two important implications of our work.
On the one hand, if you find that in these communities that are affected by paramilitary violence today, there is low demand for the type of brutal justice the paramilitaries offer, and that they are not perceived as legitimate local leaders, then the current approach – and this is what the PSNI Anti Organised Crime Unit is doing – is to target paramilitary organisations as criminal organisations. I think that's fair. However, a lot of our work, and a lot of work that we're working on now, shows that there's an important persistence of norms and practices that are linked to the conflict. And the solution to those problems can't be found through policing. These are social issues.
And so the state and people who want to improve these communities or the lives of people in these communities really must adopt a two-pronged approach where, on one hand, you're combatting the potential criminal activities of paramilitary organisations, and, on the other hand, you're trying to support these communities to break norms, to break bad practices, and to improve their quality of life ultimately.
Kristin Bakke 35:07
I think Kit raises a number of very good points that are, you know, spelling out the implications of the work we've done on the, you know, the norms and practices that are established during conflict.
With respect to the Brexit paper, I think the sort of short policy implication or warning there is really about thinking about what are the implications of campaigns – referendum campaigns and contentious referendum campaigns. And this is something you've been doing work on, Alan. And I think our work too just sort of adds to that body of work with sort of a caution about: think about what these campaigns are bringing up and what that means for society.
Alan Renwick 35:46
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
Thank you so much, Kristin and Kit. It's such an interesting project. There's a huge amount of great work going on here. And we'll have to have you back on again as you publish more of it.
We've been talking about two papers. The first is a working paper called ''Ten pound touts’: post-conflict trust and the legacy of counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland'. It's by Kristin M. Bakke and Kit Rickard and it was published by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research in January this year. And the second is an article published last year in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. It's called ‘The past, Brexit, and the future in Northern Ireland: a quasi-experiment’ by Amelie Godefroidt, Karin Dyrstad and Kristin Bakke.
As ever, you can find out all of those details in the show notes for this episode.
Next week is the start of the UCL Easter vacation so the podcast will be taking a little break. But we'll be back in late April when we will be discussing a new book on parliament and Brexit, looking at how the battles over Brexit were fought in parliament and how parliament itself was affected as a result.
Remember, to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was researched by Alice Hart and produced by Conor Kelly and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Indeed, this is the last podcast that Conor Kelly has worked on before moving on to things new, so thank you, Conor, for all your great work over the last several seasons. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.