A wealth of analysis exists on the politics of Northern Ireland, the majority of which is gender-neutral or implicitly gendered through its use of largely male perspectives. The politics of Northern Ireland is also visually hypermasculine, most recognizable through conflict imagery or political figures at the Northern Ireland Assembly. Recent activism and frustration with the lack of political movement on issues of abortion and same-sex marriage have motivated a surge in research exploring various aspects of the Northern Ireland transition from conflict, its gendered politics, and its impact on women.
Each of the authors of the books reviewed here takes to task the “unsophisticated understanding(s) of gender” (Thomson, 145) that has infused much of Northern Ireland's political analysis. They note that mainstream texts that mention gender often start from the premise that gender is not an integral part of the politics of the region or consider only the number of women in political positions. Such a position stems from an equation of politics in the region as management of homogenous ethno-national blocs with a lack of understanding of ethno-nationalism's relationship to creating and maintaining unequal gendered power relationships. Therefore, it is the perennial role of feminist academics to write in the role of women in all areas of political activity and to interrogate the role that gender plays as a structural factor in both conflict and peace.
Each author examines gender from a different perspective in these texts, ranging from an institutional approach by Jennifer Thomson and a discursive approach by Fidelma Ashe to an experiential approach by Niall Gilmartin. Taken together, these approaches provide a comprehensive analysis of the ongoing opposition to gender policy issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, the continued dominance of men in both macro- and community-level politics and peace building, and the importance of writing women into the political history of Northern Ireland as a means by which to ensure their legitimacy as political actors in the new institutions of governance. Each of these arguments emphasizes the multilayered ways in which the hegemony of ethno-national politics is reinforced and sustained, with the effect of pushing gender off the political agenda and depoliticizing women's political work.
The continual prioritization of ethno-national identity and politics is the one of the reasons for the importance of new directions of analysis in Northern Irish politics. While the Northern Ireland peace process is hailed internationally as a success story and exported as a model for global peace building, it is obvious that a wider process of conflict transformation has been less successful, with continued political stagnancy and stalemates on a range of issues and continued sectarianism in politics, rendering the process one of conflict management rather than transformation. A focus on gender can take us in new directions and draw attention to underrecognized political actors and methods to begin a transformative process founded on principles of social justice.
Fidelma Ashe's book Gender, Nationalism and Conflict Transformation is perhaps the most expansive of all the texts and draws together many of the themes of her previous work of intricate gendered analysis of sectarian protests (Ashe Reference Ashe2007), gendered political language (Ashe Reference Ashe2009), and masculinities (Ashe and Harland Reference Ashe and Harland2014) to analyze the processes of conflict transformation from a gender perspective. The book traces women's contributions to the political life of Northern Ireland from the various peace agreements and processes through community-based activism and peace building and the formal political realm. In documenting these contributions, Ashe highlights that at each stage, women's presence has been minimized in subsequent retellings of the story of the peace process. The significance of Ashe's careful retelling of political history lies in its demonstration of how the omission of gender from mainstream accounts of conflict and peace in fact contributes to ongoing contemporary gender inequalities.
The most important chapters of the book deal with underexplored areas in conflict research related to masculinity and sexuality. Feminist research has begun the important process of queering conflict and peace analysis, in particular the women, peace and security agenda (see Hagen Reference Hagen2016), and Ashe's analysis is an important contribution to this new global agenda. Chapter 5 on masculinity and men as gendered subjects stresses that women's continued exclusion from peace building is partly due to the continuance of militarized forms of masculinity through the establishment of men as legitimate peace builders based on their roles in violent conflict. As Ashe writes, “Sustaining and rebuilding male hierarchies at local levels is unlikely to dismantle violent cultures” (116). In fact, the chapter goes further, showing that armed groups have also exerted control over women's groups. Their attempts to control women's organising is a means by which to reinforce men's power and reconstitutes men as natural political leaders.
Chapter 7 on sexuality, bodies, and LGBT rights in conflict/postconflict society underscores the alternative forms of control and policing of identity and bodies that went on alongside “The Troubles” and have continued long after, including the criminalization of homosexuality and abortion. While Northern Ireland has often had different legislation than Britain, the fact that homosexuality was not decriminalized in Northern Ireland until 1982, only after a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, and abortion decriminalization took place in 2019 via Westminster, indicates the influence of conservative ethno-national and religious understandings of gender and social issues and has ensured the continuance of Northern Ireland as a place apart. One of the most important aspects of this analysis is to underscore that while abortion and LGBT rights have been presented as new political issues, they should also be considered historically as integral factors in the constitution of gender identities and power throughout conflict.
In turn, Jennifer Thomson's book Abortion Law and Political Institutions focuses on abortion politics, starting from a simple question: “Why hasn't the 1967 Abortion Act been applied to Northern Ireland?” Thomson uses feminist institutionalist theory and interviews with political actors to explore the stagnancy and opposition to change on abortion laws and its relation to institutional structures of power sharing that were set up via the Good Friday Agreement. Literature on devolved institutional structures suggests that new institutions provide an arena for the inclusion of women and gendered policy issues, with Northern Ireland providing an interesting outlier in this literature, particularly with regard to opposition on abortion law.
This feminist attention to institutions allows the author to further previous work on power sharing and the ways in which it hinders the development of a progressive gender policy agenda (Kennedy, Pierson, and Thomson Reference Kennedy, Pierson and Thomson2016; Pierson and Thomson Reference Pierson and Thomson2018). Thomson foregrounds consociationalism in this analysis, and she explores the prioritization of ethno-national identity, the institutionalization of conflict-related identities, and the persistence of critical actors who refuse to alter their position on abortion in her account of why gender and gender policy issues are marginalized as a salient political concern. Stagnancy at the Northern Ireland Assembly is compounded by a lack of understanding at Westminster of Northern Ireland and a lack of will to become involved in the region. Most interestingly, since the publication of Thomson's book in 2018, change has come via Westminster in response to a Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) inquiry into Northern Ireland's abortion laws which found these laws to be a grave and systematic violation of women's rights. Decriminalization was largely pushed by the critical actor Labour member of Parliament Stella Creasey, who lobbied for the CEDAW recommendations to be implemented.
Finally, Niall Gilmartin's book Female Combatants after Armed Struggle studies a group of women who are often ignored in both conflict and gender narratives: republican women and their experiences after conflict. Choosing this particular group of women pushes beyond traditional notions of women as solely involved in community and peace-building activities, a trope often used to “de-politicise women's actions and marginalise their experiences and needs” (7). All the women Gilmartin interviews were active in the republican movement as combatants (a term his participants do not often use themselves) or as activists. Their experiences and interpretations provide a firsthand account of women's role in conflict and a widening of what we consider political activities. The breadth of activity that women partake in and their importance to the movement is underscored in the chapter on memorialization, in which women are largely absent apart from a notable few. The invisibility of women in republican memory replicates the global narrative of a postconflict conservative gender order and attempts to push women back into the private sphere (Meintjes, Turshen, and Pillay Reference Meintjes, Turshen and Pillay2001).
One of the most important contributions of this book is the decoupling of women in politics from feminism. While republican women are a very visible part of the formal political terrain, Gilmartin points to a lessening of a radical feminist influence on republican politics. Research participants attribute this to the change in political organizing and a shift in political space: “from the streets to Stormont.” The movement of republican politics away from nonhierarchical community organizing toward a top-down institutionalized approach encourages a narrowly liberal understanding of feminism, and as such, many of the women interviewed for the project have become disillusioned with formal politics, preferring to organize in community settings. Thus, while republicanism can point to a higher number of women in political leadership positions, it does not necessarily follow that this furthers a feminist political project.
All three of these books focus on contemporary gender politics, but the past is always present in Northern Ireland, whether visually through murals, in community relations policy or institutional processes, or in political discourse linking contemporary politics to the conflicted past. Gilmartin and Ashe present the gendered terrain of the past as a means by which to understand the present, Gilmartin through the invisibility of republican women's role in conflict, which enables them to be minimized in present commemorations, and Ashe through the lack of focus on gender related harms in work intending to deal with past legacies and a lack of consultation with women's groups in addressing the past. Seen in the context of its contemporary legacy, these authors’ efforts to rewrite and reinterpret history to take into account the role of women takes on an even more vital importance.
Considering the books collectively provides us with a wealth of material to approach gender politics in Northern Ireland and in transitional societies more generally. One group of women, however, continue to sit at the margins of gender scholarship within Northern Ireland. Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist women are largely invisible as political actors, in previous research their role as supporters to the Unionist project has been detailed and the conservatism of the Unionist project is often cited as a reason for their lack of feminist political activism or identification with feminism in general. More recently, women's role at the forefront of protests over the flying of the Union flag at Belfast City Hall has inspired small studies into Protestant women's politics, but there remains a gap in our understanding of their role as political actors and in particular their understandings of feminism within a climate of renewed interest in feminist organizing. These texts do not fill this gap but provide frameworks from which to develop research which does address marginalized actors.
Current political events, including Brexit and the pandemic, indicate that the stagnancy that typifies Northern Irish politics is in need of a new approach. Mechanisms including the petition of concern (designed to allow a cross community consensus on issues of ethno-national concern) written into the power-sharing form of governance have been misused for political purposes. Currently, policy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic has been subject to deadlock when the Democratic Unionist Party triggered the petition, effectively giving it a veto over the plan and holding up urgent policy designed to curb the spread of the pandemic. Despite the fact that abortion has been decriminalized, abortion services still remain to be commissioned by the Department for Health, which continues to delay women's access to services and forces them to travel to England during the pandemic. It is clear that the current approach to governance does not work. A gendered lens offers us a new way to see the politics of Northern Ireland, but, more importantly, a feminist approach allows us a new way to reenvision how politics could be done to benefit everyone. While these books will be greatly useful to feminist academics, they ultimately could be of the most benefit for nonfeminist readers who wish to understand the politics of Northern Ireland.
