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ID:
116892
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided societies but little attention has been paid to its applicability to societies where the primary political cleavage is between secular and religious forces. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the applicability of consociationalism to the case of the Palestinian Territory. We argue that, while Palestinian society is characterised by 'pillarisation' along a secularist/Islamist cleavage, formal power-sharing between the representatives of the two main Palestinian factions, namely Fatah and Hamas, has proved elusive. However, rather than seeking to explain the seeming inability of the factions to share power by reference to the nature of the cleavage, as other authors have done, we instead highlight the contextual factors that have made power sharing difficult to achieve, namely the difficulties Hamas and Fatah face in accepting each other as political partners, and opposition from external actors.
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| 2 |
ID:
188774
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| Summary/Abstract |
Making use of archival sources, this article reconstructs the decision-making process behind the addition of an Irish language question to the 1991 Northern Ireland census. It highlights a distinctive feature of the case: whereas such decisions usually result from state-society interactions, the question was rather suggested by the Irish government, using the role granted to it by the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement to act as a kin state to promote the cultural interests of nationalists in Northern Ireland. Officials in Belfast were initially reluctant to accede to this request, though feared refusal might result in a repeat of nationalist boycotts of previous censuses. Ultimately, the precedent set by language questions employed in Wales and Scotland made exclusion hard to justify and officials reluctantly agreed to the question, coming to see the precedent as a useful argument with which to fend off potential unionist opposition, which they feared might have resulted in a rival boycott. The inclusion of the question has subsequently had significant consequences for political claims-making about the status of the Irish language in Northern Ireland.
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