Böcker av Cillian McGrattan

This book addresses the limitations of dominant ways of thinking about and doing politics in Northern Ireland. Arguing for the foregrounding of anti-sectarianism as a way of displacing the divisive dynamics of religion and nationalism, McGrattan provides a new lens for studying Northern Ireland. Drawing upon a close reading of the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, the book aligns anti-sectarianism to the ways that people refuse affiliation with the traditional ethnic values and practices. It describes this refusal as dis-identification and reveals how dissensus acts as an alternative to the displacing of equality. Returning equality and equality claims-making to a clear position of visibility, the book provides a radical rethinking of Northern Ireland a quarter century beyond the 1998 peace accord.

This book explores the debate on trauma and peacebuilding and presents the challenges for democratization that the politics of trauma present in transitional periods. It demonstrates how ideas about reconciliation are filtered through ideological lenses and become new ways of articulating communal and ethno-nationalist sentiments.

In marked contrast to literary, historical and cultural studies, there has been a limited engagement with the concepts and politics of trauma by political science and peacebuilding research. This book explores the debate on trauma and peacebuilding and presents the challenges for democratization that the politics of trauma present in transitional periods. It demonstrates how ideas about reconciliation are filtered through ideological lenses and become new ways of articulating communal and ethno-nationalist sentiments. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Iris Marion Young and with specific reference to the Northern Irish transition, it argues for a shift in focus from the representation of trauma towards its reception and calls for a more substantive approach to the study of democracy and post-conflict peacebuilding. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of peace and conflict studies, ethnic and nationalism studies, transitional justice studies, gender studies, Irish politics, nationalism and ethnicity.