Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland by Jennifer Curtis (review)

Jennifer Curtis, in Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland offers an important and innovative analysis of the peace process in Northern Ireland through the lens of human rights analysis and discourse. One of the great strengths of Curtis’ book is her exploration and elaboration of how rights are contingent and subjective. She focuses on how one could perceive the conflict and peace process in Northern Ireland through the traditional lens of human rights by focusing on claims of injustice and the denial of rights that caused the conflict, and how the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement (The Agreement) and efforts to implement it were the process by which these historical injustices were corrected and remedied. Instead of pursuing this facile and traditional narrative, Curtis offers a much more sophisticated and subtle analysis based on years of fieldwork that highlight the exceedingly contentious and evolving construction of rights in the context of peace politics in Northern Ireland. As a result, her work should be of great interest to those who study human rights, and should be seen as a major contribution to our understanding of the pursuit of peace in Northern Ireland. Her fieldwork enabled her to explain how members of each of the communities in Northern Ireland appropriated “rights talk” to pursue their collective political goals. Thus, rights discourse became a part of the conflict that could potentially play a role in pursuing peace but could also continue to entrench existing identities that perpetuate the conflict. While this ambiguity and paradox might make many uncomfortable and not conform to a more traditional understanding of a human rights agenda, it provides a more empirically satisfying explanation of human rights discourse in Northern Ireland.

The research methodology used by Curtis, participant observation, allowed her to make first-hand observations of how local community groups were often organized and motivated by the goal of achieving their economic, political, and social rights, including her observation of gay groups in recent years. Her findings corroborate the work of many other scholars; the peace process in Northern Ireland has been very successful in lowering the scale of political violence, but this achievement has been made by “balancing the collective rights of opposed community groups … and institutionalizes ethnopolitical conflict in the mechanics of post-conflict politics.”¹ Thus, a “minimalist” peace has been achieved, and Curtis argues that discussions of human rights in Northern Ireland continue the war between the communities by other means. This conclusion may seem excessively negative and cynical, but many would agree with Curtis that it is necessary, not only to understand what has been achieved, but to avoid exaggerating the lessons of the peace process. The negotiations that led to The Agreement had many admirable qualities that should be worthy of emulation elsewhere. However, the continuing sectarian divide in Northern Ireland clearly suggests that elite level negotiations or agreements cannot by themselves undermine a conflict that exists among people in their local communities. Thus, like a growing number of scholars, Curtis questions whether the consociational model of conflict management that is used to describe the governing arrangements established by The Agreement perpetuates conflict and undermines prospects for reconciliation between the communities.

Curtis summarizes and explores how many in the nationalist community came to view the Good Friday Agreement as guaranteeing them rights that had heretofore been denied to them. Her fieldwork with long and numerous discussions with those living in nationalist areas of Belfast provide compelling testimony as to how nationalists understood the changes that came with The Agreement. Curtis suggests that this narrative may have begun with Sinn Féin politicians but was rapidly adopted by many in the nationalist community. This understanding of The Agreement as an achievement of rights for Catholics coincided with and was reinforced by a simple desire to end the violence that had characterized the previous...