Symbolic, Social and Territorial Boundaries: Paradoxes of Groupness and Potentials for Change in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article focusses on social, symbolic and territorial boundaries in Northern Ireland, and the group relationships that they define. It asks how the social and symbolic boundaries have been renewed despite so much political and popular effort to move beyond them since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Theoretically, the question is a foundational one: how group boundaries go beyond individual intent. Frank Wright addressed this question nearly forty years ago, showing the role of violence as a mechanism that worked behind the backs of those who wanted change. Northern Ireland, he argued, is the sort of ‘ethnic frontier’ where there is no way out, short of revolutionary force which overthrows one group and thereby creates new borders and new scapegoats. I will argue that this conclusion pays too little attention to the socio-cultural mechanisms that reproduce group division as a quasi-institutional inertial phenomenon that is also open to everyday change. I argue that quite radical transformation of group division is possible and also difficult, and that liberal consociational institutions are much less important in promoting or hindering such change than is often supposed. This revises Wright’s argument and it suggests a way forward – radical interventionism – that is neither violent upheaval, impossible reconciliation, or stabilised constraint. In conclusion, I ask if and how change in the territorial boundaries would help or hinder this.