Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places

11. Northern Ireland: Power Sharing, Contact, Identity, and Leadership

CHAPTER 11 Northern Ireland: Power Sharing, Contact, Identity, and Leadership Ed Cairns Some commentators argue (pace McGarry and O’Leary 2006) that power sharing cannot provide a durable solution to intractable identity-based conflicts (Sisk 2003) but instead “provides only a temporary lull” in the conflict and may even “freeze group boundaries” and “heighten latent ethnic identities ” (Norris 2005, 3). Perhaps what is needed to ensure the ultimate success of power-sharing initiatives is more input from social psychology. This is what Abrams and Hogg might argue given their claim that social psychology occupies a “pivotal position” in the social sciences and is ideally placed to link the micro- and macrolevels of analysis and to demonstrate how social and individual variables “become expressed in social situations within a societal context” (2004, 98). They therefore argue that in terms of framing policy, social psychology should be enormously attractive. However, the problem is determining which parts of social psychology are relevant to analyzing power sharing. In this chapter I argue, with illustrations from research in Northern Ireland , that we need to look at the part of social psychology that has specialized in bringing together people from different backgrounds—known as the contact hypothesis or contact theory (Allport 1954; Hewstone and Brown 1986; Pettigrew 1986). In its simplest form, contact theory proposes that bringing together individuals from opposing groups can, “under optimal conditions,” reduce intergroup conflict. In the context of power sharing, therefore, the hope would be that the vast amount of evidence now available as a result of empirical research based on contact theory (see Pettigrew and Tropp 2000) Northern Ireland 279 can be used to build on the (temporary) lull in conflict afforded by the current power-sharing arrangements in Northern Ireland. Searching for a point of contact between social psychology and the short- to mid-term impact of power sharing, I was struck by the following quotation: “there were lots of words written on the flow chart, but I just wrote one word—leadership.” These are the words Martin McGuinness uttered during a television interview (BBC NI television interview, September 5, 2007) upon returning from meeting with a delegation representing the warring factions in Iraq in which he and others provided insights into the peace process and power sharing in Northern Ireland. In fact any attention given to leadership in the peace process has tended to come from nonacademic sources. This is all the more surprising given the fact that it is now more than forty years since Rose pointed out that the history of Ireland, including Ulster, offers copious examples of the importance of political leadership (1971). This sentiment was echoed by Heskin, Cairns, and McCourt, who claimed that “one area of political psychology which would appear to be of relevance to understanding the conflict in Northern Ireland is that concerned with people’s perceptions of political leadership” (1990, 355). Despite this they noted that work on leadership was “a glaring omission from the existing research base.” Today it would appear that the position has not changed. In her book on the role of leaders in the current peace process, Gormley-Heenan concluded that the role of political leaders has apparently been viewed, at least by academics, “as both decidedly obvious and warranting little further explanation” (2005). Further, she notes that journalists and others who did write about Northern Irish political leaders tended to focus mostly on such things as the leaders’ motivations and their personalities. These emphases on leaders’ personal attributes closely reflect early leadership research in psychology, which tended to concentrate on the leader’s personality. For example, do leaders with authoritarian attitudes appeal to certain followers? Early research suggested that situational determinants are critical while subsequent theorizing adopted an interactional approach and claimed that it is the interaction of personality and situation, which means that some leaders are best suited to certain tasks (Bales and Slater 1955). What has tended to be ignored until recently is the psychological impact the leader has on his/her followers. More recent theorizing in social psychology (see Haslam 2004 for a review) claims that this is critical because the way we think about ourselves, our self-concept, our social identity, has 280 Ed Cairns important effects upon the way we think, feel, and behave. In turn leadership has the ability to change the way followers think about themselves and come to define their social identities. In this chapter...