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Peace Settlements and Political Transformation in Divided Societies: Rethinking Northern Ireland and South Africa

Peace Settlements and Political Transformation in Divided Societies: Rethinking Northern Ireland and South Africa

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Studies in Nationalism and Ethnicity

General Political ScienceBritish History

ISBN10: 103211987X
ISBN13: 9781032119878
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Oct 3 2022
Pages: 206
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Peace Settlements and Political Transformation in Divided Societies examines what happened to Northern Ireland and South Africa after their miraculous political settlements in the 1990s, in which comparison between the two cases played a small but significant role.

The author extends the story by exploring the connections between these two deeply divided societies during the consolidation of their settlements. He shows the ways in which their paths have subsequently diverged in both reality and perception. At the outset of the transformation of the two polities, the similarities between the two cases tended to be overstated. In this context, the book explains how the South African case came to be misidentified as an example of consociationalism, and the influence that this has continued to exert on comparative studies of power-sharing. In the process, other aspects of South Africa's political transformation, including respect for the constitution and the rule of law, have been overlooked and underappreciated. In the case of Northern Ireland, a missing element in the treatment of its settlement as a model for other deeply divided societies has been the role that external mediation played in the creation and survival of its institutions. Northern Ireland's dependence on favourable external circumstances explains in large part why the Good Friday Agreement is now facing a threat to its survival. By contrast, South Africa's political institutions seem relatively secure, despite the vast scale of the country's socio-economic problems.

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General Political Science