Myself and Eliz McArdle from Ulster University and on behalf of the Peace Summit Partnership submitted a responses to the Draft Programme for Government for Northern Ireland 2024. Our response focused on contemporary peacebuilding issues for young people in Northern Ireland. It can be downloaded here.
The response was launched with the Peace Summit Partnership response at Stormont on 4 November 2024.
The article was published in the Peacebuilding journal entitled "Beyond intragroup betrayal during intergroup relational peacebuilding".
You can download the article here, open access.
This article addresses a neglected human cost of relational peacebuilding, identified in an earlier article on ‘peace as betrayal’. The focus here is how relational peacebuilders can respond to painful accusations of betrayal by family-type group members evoked by working with the ‘other side’. Continuing to draw on the reflections of experienced peace practitioners from South Africa, the Israel-Palestine region and the conflict in and about Northern Ireland, a contrasting distinction is made between two routes: a ‘clarification’ route that explains why working with ‘them’ is not a betrayal of ‘us’ vs a ‘counter-critique’ response that attempts to turn the traitor tables on the accusers. An evaluative discussion of the counter-critique route explores the pitfalls of political abuse, avoidance of shared responsibility and underestimating ‘thin’ relations (Margalit), as well as the complementary potential of the clarification and the counter-critique routes beyond peace as betrayal.
