Masculinities in Transition? Exclusion,Ethnosocial Power,and Contradictions in Excombatant Community-based Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This study critically examines how masculinities and intersecting ethnonational and social class identities underscore the social and political agencies of excombatants in Northern Ireland and in the specific context of community-based peacebuilding. The authors draw on interviews with female and male leaders in grassroots and governmental organizations, which illustrate how state-led practices of exclusion reshape such intersectional identities and increase the instrumentality of hypermasculinist, pseudo-paramilitary practices in maintaining excombatants’ status and control on neighborhood levels. The research documents how structural dynamics of excombatants’ social class locations and political disaffection help shape their social agencies of “resistance,” underscored by desires for autonomy and recognition, and channeled by ethnogendered scripts rooted in both violent cultures of paramilitarism and nonviolent peacebuilding masculinities. The implications on women of male excombatants’ takeover of leadership roles in the community sector are also discussed.

Keywords

masculinities peacebuilding paramilitaries class Northern Ireland exclusion transitional justice

While the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of excombatants have become increasingly central prerogatives in peacebuilding interventions, the strategies of reintegration in particular have garnered increasing scholarly debate. Providing leadership roles for excombatants in cross-community peacebuilding and transitional justice efforts is one way in which governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have sought to facilitate the reintegration of these individuals into their home communities. Purportedly, excombatant participation in community initiatives can be relatively effective in embedding their stakes in the emerging society and minimizing the potential of their political disaffection and remobilization (Kingma 2001). Proponents of such forms of DDR even suggest that excombatants “can represent a major force for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of war-torn societies” as a result of their experiences in conflict (Klingbiel et al. 1995, 6; see also McEvoy and Shirlow 2009) and their capacity to convince hardliners and potential peace spoilers to stand down (McAuley, Tonge, and Shirlow 2010). Male excombatants are implicitly posited as especially qualified as “community leaders” due—somewhat paradoxically—to their histories of collective political violence and the militarized, ethnocultural masculinities which have underscored such histories. At the least, the promotion of excombatant community leadership is accepted as a “realistic” or practical approach to local peacekeeping and peacebuilding initiatives (Ashe 2009; Edwards and McGrattan 2011).

Increasingly, research by proponents of excombatant community-based peacebuilding has garnered criticism. Skeptics argue that prioritizing ex-combatant “community leadership” privileges the interests of former perpetrators over those of their victims, perpetuating the “terroristic narratives” and ideologies that underpinned the initial escalation of mass violence, and thus minimizing the transformative potential of “peace” (Edwards and McGrattan 2011). Yet, often unwittingly, research by both proponents and critics of excombatant community-based restorative justice (CBRJ) and peacebuilding relegate issues of ethnogendered identities and relations to “peripheral sites of analysis” (Ashe and Harland 2014, 749). Social class identities and inequalities also tend to remain marginal in scholarly discussions about challenges and possibilities of postconflict reconstruction. Typically, such issues are mentioned only briefly; in some instances, they have even been rejected as central categories of analysis. For example, McGarry and O’Leary (1995) have been charged with demonstrating an “unhealthy preoccupation to attack materialist analyses of the conflict” in Northern Ireland (Coulter 2014, 773). “Almost two decades on, this dismissal of class-based analysis remains akin to a doxa in academic accounts of political subjectivities in Northern Ireland” (Coulter 2014, 773) among other “postconflict” societies. The dominant methodological approaches in such research thus preclude empirical attention to ways in which shifts in masculinities in particular and intersectional class and gendered cultures more generally shape peace process outcomes.

Given the exponential growth in attention to masculinities in social research more broadly, it is surprising that emphasis on the subject has been relatively sparse in studies of conflict and peacebuilding—especially when considering the inextricable link between masculinities and nationalisms. As indicated by Nagel (1998, 750), “terms like honour, patriotism, cowardice and duty are hard to distinguish as either nationalist or masculinist, since they seem so thoroughly tied both to the nation and to manliness” (see also Yuval-Davis 1997). Nonetheless, in the peacebuilding literature specifically, what O’Brien (1981) originally termed “malestream” research remains dominant.¹ Generally speaking, it is “all about men and severely neglectful of talking explicitly about them” as men (Hearn 1997, 48). Especially little empirical attention has been given to the implications of ethnocultural practices underscored by intersectional class and masculinist identities for excombatant peacebuilding specifically.

Drawing on interviews with women and men who serve in community-based and public peacebuilding and restorative justice organizations in Belfast, this study examines how reconfigured masculinities, along intersecting lines of ethnonational and class identities, underscore the social and political agencies of excombatants in the specific context of community-based peacebuilding. By utilizing a critical and feminist theoretical framework, the study identifies how such intersecting identities, as well as state-led practices of exclusion, interact in shaping—and restricting—male excombatants’ social agencies, having counterproductive implications for postconflict intercommunity relations. The perceived (and real) social exclusion of excombatants by elected officials and their more general “limits of legitimacy” (Mitchell 2008) help sustain the former’s political disaffection and underscore the importance of cultures of paramilitarism in male excombatants’ efforts in maintaining power and control on neighborhood levels. The research identifies structural forces which constitute male excombatant alienation and help shape their social agencies of “resistance,” which are underscored by desires for autonomy and recognition and channeled by cultural, gendered scripts rooted in both violent and “nonviolent reconstituted” or “peacebuilding masculinities” (Ashe 2009; Ashe and Harland 2014). Accordingly, the study traces the forms and limited extent of transition in excombatant masculinities, linking them to broader problems of exploitation by ethnopolitical elite.

Finally, in order to not “assist [in] the forgetting of women and the gendered power relations between men and women” when analyzing the behavior of this group of men (Hearn 1997, 50), we also discuss the implications of the aforementioned dynamics in the resilencing and redisplacement of women in working-class communities in particular. Ashe (2009, 302) illuminates how the promotion of excombatant CBRJ by academic proponents has continued to conspicuously exclude attention to “gender [in]equality and power,” thus having important “gendering effects” as the voices of women are unwittingly sublimated (see also Gilmartin 2015). The “implications on women” of reconfigurations and/or reproductions of masculinities and their embeddedness within state and civil society institutions warrant greater empirical attention in Northern Ireland and postconflict societies more generally (Ashe and Harland 2014, 754). In contrast to most work on the prospects and limitations of male excombatant peacebuilding, this study puts the voices of women (among others) involved in peacebuilding at the center of analysis and, by doing so, offers important insight into gendered and class dimensions of power which operate on both the state and grassroots levels and undermine the transformative potential of community-based peacebuilding.

Masculinities, Class, and Ethnonationalism in a Society Emerging from Conflict

Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities have emphasized the “historical, context dependent, shifting, and multi-faceted” nature of masculinist identities and ideologies (Ashe and Harland 2014, 749; see also Butler 1990; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Collins 1990; Kimmel 1996; Yuval-Davis 2006). Class (dis)locations and racial/ethnic constructions are ultimately framed in gender-specific terms; likewise, masculinist or feminist practices and beliefs differ according to particular class and racial/ethnic contexts. “Gender is always constituted in a culturally specific form, and an ethnicity [or ethno-nationalism] always pronounces its norms for manhood or womanhood” (Cockburn 2004, 29). As Lysaght (2002, 52) points out, moreover, “masculinities must be viewed as necessarily relational and contingent, and subject to transformation depending upon locational and positional change.” In Kimmel and Ferber’s (2000) discussion of white supremacist groups’ framing of the “farm crisis” in the rural United States, for example, they illustrate how such groups serve as ideological and organizational channels through which lower-middle-class white men retake control of their masculinities over against socially constructed racial others and in contexts of economic loss.

It is particularly critical to examine potential implications associated with similar transitions in the social locations of men and women in societies emerging from conflict, whose core gendered identities have been historically constructed in binary, ethnonational terms and in contexts of sectarian and political violence (e.g., from Northern Ireland, see Arextaga 1997; Little 2002). The failure, for example, to establish social, political, and economic institutions constitutive of the peace process in ways which are inclusive to historically marginalized populations most affected by legacies of violence could result in the reconsolidation of polarized, interlocking ethnopolitical, sectarian and masculinist identities, and the persistence of (low intensity) conflict and violence (Holland and Rabrenovic 2016). There is no reason to assume that the cessation of violence brought about by peace accords will automatically translate to a linear transition to positive or productive masculinities. Combatant or terrorist disengagement from violence does not necessitate their “deradicalization” (Horgan 2008) or a decline in the influence of the political ideologies that underscored escalations of mass violence in the first place (Edwards and McGrattan 2011). This is especially the case in the absence of systematic efforts to reduce the centrality of normative, hypermasculinities to men’s ethnonational identities. Rather, the extent and form of transition from militarized masculinities to “nonviolent reconstituted masculinities” (Ashe 2009, 306) in a given transitional society will ultimately depend on the particular institutional conditions which constitute “postconflict reconstruction.” The multifaceted and context dependent nature of masculinities should be particularly salient in societies emerging from conflict, moreover, as the transitional period away from violent, intergroup conflict and toward peace will necessarily entail quite visible reconfigurations—or reproductions—of masculinities. As feminist researchers have also well argued, mapping the transitions and/or persistence of gender roles is especially effective through historical comparative analysis of the emerging and/or reconstituted roles of men and women in the “new” or postconflict society (Ashe 2012; Cockburn and Zarkov 2002).

Conflict, Peacebuilding, Gender, and Class in Northern Ireland

At the onset of the troubles—the euphemistic term given to the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland, ending with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement—and concomitant increase in the threat of sectarian violence, paramilitaries’ mobilization, and self-ascribed roles as “defenders of the community” overshadowed the integral community roles of women, having long-term implications in shaping dominant discourses and memories of the conflict. Women “became framed as representing the vulnerability of the community that required male protection from the ‘enemy,’” displacing their political voice within their respective ethnoreligious communities (Ashe and Harland 2014, 752; see also Peterson 1999). More generally, “Sales [1997, 4] suggests that ‘sectarianism, and the construction of political and social life around [ethno-national] community loyalties, has been a powerful force in maintaining women’s subordination’” in Northern Ireland (Little 2002, 165; see also Racioppi and O’Sullivan 2001). In societies emerging from conflict more generally, “ethnicity appears in part to be created, maintained and socialized through male control of gender identities,” while “women’s fundamental human rights and dignity are often caught up in male power struggles” (Handrahan 2004, 429). In Northern Ireland, like other (post) conflict societies, “ethnic dividends” (Cockburn 2004, 35)—or the advantages that might accrue to individuals due to their membership in a particular ethnic or nationalist group—have also been moslty “patriarchal dividends.” Advantages accrue mostly to men, “as individuals and as a collectivity, from a gender order in which men and [semi-militarized] masculinity are dominant” (Cockburn 2004, 34; see also Connell 2002).

The power-sharing framework of governance established since the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement brought an impressive cessation of violence in Northern Ireland but also recentered politics around issues of ethnonational identity, “reinforc[ing] the marginal location of gender politics in the political realm” (Ashe and Harland 2014, 749) while legitimizing normative, ethnomasculinities with which such a politics has been historically constructed (Ashe 2009). After approximately 30 years of conflict, paramilitaries’ acquiescence to the peace process was eventually “bought,” so to speak. As conditional for the cooperation of paramilitary groups from both ethnopolitical blocs and thus the successful implementation of the 1998 Agreement, Amnesty was given to political prisoners detained for violent offenses and without any concomitant state mechanism to deal with unresolved disputes and resentments over legacies of political and sectarian violence (Rolston 2006). Subsequently, “peace money” from foreign donors was allocated to local grassroots, community-based organizations employing or run by former paramilitaries, who have since come to serve with some success in community leadership roles (Dwyer 2012; McEvoy and Shirlow 2009; Shirlow et al. 2005). The Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, for example, has led in the promotion of offender-based, cross-community restorative justice initiatives, facilitating the development of Coiste an n-Irarchimi and the Ex Prisoners Interpretative Centre (EPIC)—Irish Catholic and Protestant exprisoner coalitions, respectively—which engage together in a variety of cross-community projects (McAuley, Tonge, and Shirlow 2010; Rolston 2007).

Ultimately, though, the stability of the peace process has always been predicated on managing the potential threat of paramilitary reescalations of violence. Consequently, the political and social interests of marginalized groups—and women in particular—have been sidelined (Gilmartin 2015), while “the legacy of militarized masculinities and the social conditions that shaped those masculinities have not been addressed sufficiently” (Ashe and Harland 2014, 754). Consequently, excombatant “community leadership” has entailed the recolonization of community space and takeover of salaried roles in the grassroots peacebuilding sector by former male combatants and terrorists. The exclusion of female excombatants within the republican/nationalist² community (Gilmartin 2015) who had been pivotal players during the conflict (Arextaga 1997; Dowler 1998) and whose political violence was considered “nonnormative” (Ashe and Harland 2014, 752) is, in contrast, indicative of the more general centrality of normative, semimilitarized, male masculinities in social structures which constitute the postconflict society. According to findings from the interviews with community leaders reported here, men’s histories of political violence continue to underscore the “legitimacy” of their takeover of community leadership roles once dominated by women in working-class urban areas.

Moreover, despite the colonization of community space by pseudo-paramilitaries and former male political prisoners, the influence of these actors is certainly not without its limits and should not be interpreted without consideration of the broader political environment and increasingly evident class inequalities in Northern Ireland which transcend ethnonational difference. Ashe and Harland (2014, 749) bring attention to the importance of acknowledging how “certain models of masculinities engender a range of power-effects,” which are not only exerted by men over women; also, “the intersectionality of masculinities results in relationships of power and subordination between groups of men” (Ashe and Harland 2014, 750; see also Connell 1995; Kimmel 1996). Most excombatants come from relatively deprived working-class communities and, in important respects, are located in the subordinated social and economic positions vis-à-vis men from middle-class communities.

Proponents of CBRJ in Northern Ireland have identified how concern among former loyalist and republican combatants or terrorists about the economic deprivation of their respective working-class communities significantly underscores their collective commitment to cross-community work (Shirlow et al. 2005). Income and educational inequalities between middle-class and working-class communities have become increasingly salient in Northern Ireland since the 2008 global economic crisis, frustrating intercommunity divisions (Creary and Byrne 2014; Holland and Rabrenovic 2016). “Absolute poverty before housing costs” reached at least 24 percent by 2011 (Nolan 2014, 78), with rates of unemployment, underemployment, and state entitlement dependency far outranking the other three UK countries (Coulter 2014). Clearly, Northern Ireland’s “peace dividend has accrued not to the poorest sections of society…but rather to those that already enjoyed considerable privilege” (Coulter 2014, 767). As we argue here, concerns of former male paramilitaries about their own social exclusion and the simultaneous deepening marginalization of “their” broader communities risk underscoring more problematic behaviors of this group and the more contradictory implications of their leadership in community-based projects.

Policies which collectively amount to the formal criminalization and stigmatization of exparamilitaries remain in place at the time of writing. Although republican exprisoners receive greater legitimacy and informal support from within their broader ethnoreligious community than their loyalist counterparts do from their own (Rolston 2006), neither group can claim compensation for injuries under the Criminal Injuries legislation, they’re typically denied loans for small businesses and mortgages, they’re denied visas to travel abroad, they have particular difficulty obtaining various forms of insurance, and are unable to adopt children (Ritchie 2002; Rolston 2007; Shirlow 2012). Such phenomena, in addition to employers’ right to exclude applicants with criminalized histories of political violence, reflect a more general trend of state-sponsored social exclusion. Ironically, participation of republican and loyalist excombatants in positive social reconstruction efforts have occurred despite weak investment among Unionist and British political elite. It was the success of one local NGO—the Community Foundation of Northern Ireland—in securing funding from the European Union to support exprisoner peacebuilding initiatives that facilitated their participation in the first place (Rolston 2007). As our findings suggest, however, the simultaneous persistence of their state-based social exclusion has important, negative impacts on the political and cultural trajectories of former paramilitary agencies, including their roles in postconflict reconstruction. The persistence of semimilitarized masculinities under conditions of political and social exclusion contributes to the more underhanded practices of some former paramilitary prisoners based on prerogatives of power and control and the concomitant marginalization of women within relatively deprived working-class communities.³

A Note on the Sample and Method

The analysis draws on eighteen interviews with peace activists and community leaders in Belfast, including five excombatants (four loyalist and one republican). (Some other respondents might be excombatants or at least affiliated with paramilitary organizations on the republican side but did not acknowledge so.) Seventeen of the interviews were one-on-one, with one taking the form of a group discussion with exprisoners and two women loyalists involved in CBRJ projects. The interviewees included seven women and sixteen men, with ages ranging from mid-twenties to sixties. All interview participants worked at community organizations or public institutions in Belfast committed to a variety of issues in peacebuilding, with two also serving as elected public officials (one current and one former). Initial interview contacts were made through colleagues at Northeastern University in Boston and the Institute on Conflict Research, Belfast. Subsequent contacts were made through a “snowball” or referral sampling method. The participants are all active in a diverse set of peacebuilding networks and interact on regular bases with numerous actors, including exprisoners/paramilitaries. Thus, they are especially capable of explaining important dynamics underscoring the implications of this group—however diverse—for the peace process in Northern Ireland. One strength of the sample is that it comprises both exprisoners and others—particularly women—involved with them in the community and public sectors. In this respect, convergences in the discourses of the diverse individuals included in the sample contribute to the validity and reliability of the data, while the voices of women in the sample provide especially important insights into the gendered—or masculinist—nature of “community-based peacebuilding.” All interviews took place in Belfast in May and June of 2014 in the private offices of respondents or public locations of their choosing and were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by the authors using a grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin 1990). The data help answer the question of what transition really means in Northern Ireland. Does it simply correspond to the cessation of violence? Or has it also entailed a more positive movement toward the inclusion of historically marginalized groups such as women?

Ambiguities of Excombatant “Community-Based” Peacebuilding: Empirical Findings

Although respondents emphasize the problems of excombatant or exterrorist roles in the community sector disproportionately, and the persistence of hypermasculinist cultures specifically, most nonetheless acknowledge that exprisoners continue to make significant contributions to the fragile peace process in important respects. Several respondents point out that many in the loyalist exprisoner community, for example, are more willing to engage in cross-community work with republicans—including former IRA terrorists—than middle-class unionism and political elite. According to a senior participant in the peacebuilding community, “people who were actually out killing Catholics are quite happy to sit down with IRA men now. Its routine, it’s normal.” In one account, a young republican community leader discussed a variety of projects he has worked on in cooperation with loyalist exprisoners, including the transformation of a derelict building into an apartment complex housing both Protestant and Catholic families in an otherwise segregated area of Belfast. Another example of effective excombatant participation in grassroots peacebuilding is the development of the mobile phone network by the grassroots organization InterAction Belfast, facilitating the coordination of loyalist and republican exprisoners and the police in preventing escalations of violence at the “peace walls”⁴ dividing the two communities.⁵

Such positive former paramilitary agencies, however, are exercised within contexts in which traditional, ethnocentric identities and ideologies are simultaneously celebrated and reified with references to histories of ethnopolitical violence. For example, one respondent explains how

some individuals [with histories of paramilitarism] have had a positive influence…. The one thing they can do is speak to more hardline individuals who would be less likely to negotiate. They would respect them in driving change.

The normative, masculinist ethnocultures of former paramilitary prisoners now dominating roles of community-based peacebuilding are implicitly legitimized via reference to their histories of political violence and the respect such histories elicit from “hardline individuals.” Moreover, echoing a point made by other respondents, one republican community leader involved in a variety of positive peacebuilding ventures emphasizes that cross-community work in transforming political ideologies is rare and for most, undesirable. Rather, such ideologies are linked affectively with loyalty to (male) comrades who fought and who were killed in the conflict:

Even though the constitutional question here, and your ethnicity, and whether your allegiance is to Britain or to an all-Ireland—even though that has been the basis that has driven us to conflict over the years—they’re still genuine aspirations. So I don’t think any of us would want to work toward an end goal where we water down our own aspirations. People fought for, died for, killed for those beliefs, so why would you want to get rid of them?

A female respondent who has worked for years with former paramilitaries comments further on “this notion of betrayal of former comrades or whatever,” suggesting that it “brings with it guilt. If you’re going to engage with another person who was formerly the enemy, there’s a guilt associated with that…But we can’t talk about that….” In-group loyalty in this respect contributes to the reconstitution of ethnopolitical binaries, the sublimation of alternative political priorities and alliances and—concomitantly—the reproduction of normative, (post) conflict masculinities. More generally, respondents from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds suggest that the ultimate political goals of both (male) excombatant communities generally remain mutually exclusive and that “putting aside the constitutional question is not something” they are willing to do.

As an example of semimilitarized, ethnomasculinities still at play in working-class communities, moreover, a loyalist exprisoner testifies to what he claims to be the ongoing threat of violence exercised by former IRA prisoners in the interest of extorting criminal justice authorities:

Sinn Fein, the IRA, has power over the police. It’s all based on the idea that, if we don’t get our own way, we’ll walk out. You see when they had the protest by the mural of Gerry Adams…⁶ one of the head men of the IRA…stood up…and turned around and said “We still haven’t gone away, you know.” So what does that tell people within my community? They’re still there.

The same respondent is cited below explaining the persistence of low-intensity loyalist violence in efforts to extort “peace monies.” Apparently, cultures of semimilitarized masculinities continue to pervade male excombatant networks, corresponding to tendencies toward a politics of domination on the local or “community” level.

According to a senior community leader, moreover, the narrow agenda of excombatants involved in peacebuilding generally reflects a broader trend, in which

these groups [are] doing this [peacebuilding and restorative justice work] through the lens of a single identity…An imaginative peace—a peace beyond where we are now, beyond the simplified identities—I don’t think that’s a peace that most political parties or many civil society groups hope for, regretfully.

Such a peace “beyond the simplified identities” includes one which ideally promotes the political power of women, the poor, and other marginalized populations. Importantly, moreover, the persistence of the reproduction of mutually exclusive and concomitant ethnonational and ethnomasculinist identities is not unique to excombatants but cuts across most “political parties and civil society groups” (discussed further below).

At the same time, the reproduction of mutually exclusive ethnopolitics and ethnoreligious segregation on local levels is largely a result of culturally specific and gendered motivations and reflect the marginalization of female influence following the initial establishment of peace. According to one female respondent, exparamilitary prisoner groups

have good leaders. [But] they’ve been preceded by an army of female leaders who were moved out of positions of influence as the ceasefires happened gradually, [and] when jobs [in peacekeeping and peacebuilding] became available. And that was obvious when we were organizing community meetings, that it was women [leading]. After the ceasefires started…some of that was about people feeling safe and some of that was about people taking a step back and other people deciding that they needed to take more [control]. [Consequently] there’s a whole history of [women] organizing and building work on common issues and soldiering along through difficult times that is therefore lost and not held by the new people…. Fifteen years on, why is “ex combatant” the key determinant feature of why someone is seen as a leader in an area? That seems to be a very skewed form of analysis of political or civil leadership.

Similarly, according to another female community leader,

In terms of the peace process, there’s certainly a theory out there that a lot of the work was initiated by women and women’s organizations. And then men followed through and took over what was happening…The movement doesn’t [exist] in the same way…I wouldn’t see the women still very much part of making things happen.

Female respondents emphasize how the grassroots peacemaking efforts led in many ways by women would subsequently transition to a peacebuilding phase coopted by men, including exparamilitaries uneasy about their future roles in the society. While filling central roles in public life during the height of conflict, peace brings a potential loss in status for such individuals who also face bleak employment prospects as a result of their criminalized status and generally limited credentials. The takeover of community roles marked a (partial) turn away from militarized masculinities and transition to peacebuilding masculinities. At the same time, though exprisoners have made important contributions to the peace process, the marginalization of women in community leadership positions restricts the transformative potential of the peace process. In this sense, the transition from “conflict” to “postconflict” masculinities is incomplete and has, at least in certain respects, entered a liminal stage.

Excombatant Community Control and the Patriarchy of Peace in Working-class Belfast

Respondents’ in-depth descriptions of their experiences working with and observing the exprisoner community implicates masculinist cultural prerogatives of power and control as partially underscoring both the violent and nonviolent activities of some former male paramilitaries involved in peacebuilding and CBRJ. One female community leader, for example, explains how limited development in the innovation of peacebuilding projects has much to do with “leadership within the communities…A lot of it is men, and a lot of it is people who were at war ten years ago and they’re still in learning curves.” She elaborates on how “just because you happen to be a former paramilitary doesn’t make you good at this stuff. They still have a crude measurement of their politics and their ethnicity and all of those issues.”

At the same time, some paramilitary elements maintain a quite hostile political presence and in ways that are counterproductive to the creation of cross-community integration or the transformation of identity politics. In 2010, in response to the murder of a dissident loyalist by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)—a loyalist paramilitary organization—Dawn Purvis—the only elected official of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP)⁷ serving in the Northern Ireland Assembly—resigned. She cited the obstruction the UVF poses to the PUP’s ability to serve its constituency effectively as one reason for her resignation. The widow of the former head of the PUP added that Purvis “suffered from a macho culture where some loyalists might not have listened to the female politician.”⁸

The same culture of paramilitarism provides means through which former leaders in the conflict can retain power and status amid their criminalization and stigmatization. Not coincidentally, female respondents offer most detail on this point. One such respondent commented on ongoing “punishment attacks” or violent vigilantism as one example:

Remember, these [ex-paramilitaries] were the somebodies of yesterday who are the nobodies of today in the peace process. It’s because they weren’t a part of the political process, and they were used to having this power base, and being able to keep control…. And we still have communities where there is huge paramilitary existence. And those people really haven’t seen peace because there is still that threat and fear…. I had huge concerns around Community Restorative Justice [CRJ]…I’ve seen that met out in totally inappropriate ways in my community. People pretending to be around Community Restorative Justice, you know, turning up where there was a group of young people standing, and then taking the baseball bats out and [with] the balaclavas on and just, you know, beating them nearly into submission.

Several respondents emphasize the issue of exprisoner/paramilitary ex-paramilitary prisoner desire for control and power as driving the participation of some members in peace process initiatives, ultimately restricting its scope. According to one respondent, exprisoner participation in voluntary community restorative justice schemes is “still about this control within a community. So ‘we control the purse strings,’ so ‘we say what service goes in and what service doesn’t.’ It goes back to that rather than what is actually in need in the community.” Another respondent, also highlighting the issue of control, described how a young person who wanted to initiate an educational community project for underprivileged youth ultimately gave up due to resistance by a local paramilitary “community leader” who was unhappy that the young person did not go to him first for permission:

when they went back to their old community [for approval], the head boy from the paramilitary then put the form together that said, “we exclude these people, we don’t deal with them. They went above our heads, and they went to government, and they were….” And that was it. And the young person who had no skills, who was trying to help support the young people in the area, all of a sudden didn’t bother any more. So that has to tell you something [about the control ex-prisoners and paramilitaries have over working-class communities].

In another example, a respondent describes what she considers “the worst of community restorative justice [she had] ever seen.” According to her,

A pensioner’s house was broken into and the young person was identified, and [representatives from] the Community Restorative Justice, and the elderly person, went to the father, who was connected to paramilitaries. And the next thing was CRJ was putting a petition around the area to get the elderly woman out of her home. So the community, for once, was up in arms and saying “this is not happening. It’s not appropriate.” And the best part about it was the paramilitary person rang the police and said he was being harassed by these people.

The issue of exparamilitary “community leaders’” control on neighborhood levels is also exemplified by one respondent’s account of the organization of schools in a working-class Protestant community in South Belfast. Not only are schools generally segregated by religion, but there is a noticeable extent of fragmentation between the different subgroups within the working-class Protestant community, each corresponding to the influence of distinct pseudo-paramilitary factions (Loyalist Volunteer Force [LVF], UVF, Ulster Defense Association [UDA]):

You have a Protestant community, but there’s [sic] three communities in the one community—Sandy Row area and the Village. You’ve got the LVF, UVF, and UDA and they’re all there…You have three separate schools. You have 400 children; 155 of them have special needs. And what better way to break that cycle than bringing those children together and educating them, because the schools aren’t fit…. They can’t agree on a site. There’s room on one of the schools to build a big enough school for everybody, but the other two lots have to agree.

Elaborating on problems of funding community-based organizations led by the same groups, the same respondent explains how they’re

competing now because the plots are getting smaller and smaller. Government should have said, “look, here’s what is needed in this area. If you can come together collectively, and work in partnership to make sure it’s delivered, then the money can be mainstreamed through government.” But it never happened. Because if you do away with three organizations into one, then whose going to head the one?

Such competition over local leadership roles in community-based organizations reflects the imperative of maintaining a sense of social status through masculine practices (competition) and goals (power and control).⁹ The aforementioned dynamics underscored by ethnocultures of masculinity restrict the scope of change participants will pursue, and silences the voices of potential innovative contributors to social and political transformation. As the previous quote suggests, moreover, this process helps reproduce structures of ethnoreligious segregation and fragmentation which more generally act as long-term impediments to intergroup interdependency and trust.¹⁰

Several respondents suggest that the creation of an “industry” in “peace consultancy” made the peace process overly dependent—paradoxically—on the perpetuation of paramilitaries historically opposed to political compromise with the traditional ethnoreligious other. As one woman and prominent community leader explains:

I’ve been involved in the women’s sector and rights for women. And the peace monies…they’re spending something like 6 lb 25 on children and 3 lb 20 on women and 120 lb on ex-prisoners. You know, so they’re creating an industry for ex-prisoners…. But also…if the paramilitaries have gone away, how can we still have this ongoing industry of ex-prisoners, you know?

The marginalization of women and children reflected in the allocation of peace monies is hardly coincidental to the reconsolidation of men’s power in community roles and thus the masculinization of “community leadership.” Paradoxically, exprisoners have retained “community leader” status in peacebuilding partially because of their (former) paramilitary ties, while such a process has, in turn, helped to reconstitute the legitimacy of pseudo-paramilitary organizations and—accordingly—the imperative of sustaining them. While such practices have provided an avenue for men with histories of violence to obtain employment and exert influence in working-class communities, the women in the same communities have consequently become remarginalized and resilenced.

At the same time, the importance of membership in pseudo-paramilitary and community organizations is also underscored by excombatants’ exclusion from full citizenship and the social entitlements it entails as well as the marginalization of the broader working-class communities in which they tend to reside and exert most influence.

Exprisoner Alienation and the Contingencies of Peace

The formal labeling of political exprisoners convicted of violent offenses cuts them off from alternative channels of social mobility while displacing their sense of political agency. Although they maintain power within community-based networks rooted in cultures of neoparamilitarism, the opportunities available through such networks are limited and, given the impending budget cuts stemming from Westminster’s imposition of “welfare reform” and the British vote to withdraw from the European Union, increasingly uncertain. Indeed, interview data do not indicate that excombatants feel particularly empowered by their agencies in the voluntary sector. The structural restrictions on social entitlements and perceived contempt from political elite are fostering alienation and resentment toward mainstream Unionism among loyalist exparamilitaries in particular. Such trends risk influencing the latter to opt out of important grassroots peacekeeping and peacebuilding work or even exploit positions in the community sector for their personal interests. (Although seemingly less widespread, such trends are also indicated by respondents to occur in republican communities.) While the relatively greater sociopolitical opportunities available for nationalist exprisoners and Sinn Fein’s growth in political power are seen as symptomatic of the “siege” facing loyalists, perceptions of being exploited by Unionist politicians exacerbate their political “disillusionment.” The following statement of one loyalist exprisoner is a case in point:

When it comes to ex-prisoners, there’s a lot of disillusionment. Recently there was a fella elected in Coleraine. I read the headlines: “a loyalist elected: ex long-term UVF prisoner elected in Coleraine….” [Ex-IRA prisoners are] seen as the peacemakers. But when a loyalist steps forward and comes out, even DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] shuns them out. When it suits them they help them out, and when it doesn’t suit you, you shun them…[Loyalist ex-prisoners] over the years have faced down their own people trying to stop trouble at parades and everything else. But I wouldn’t do it no more myself. Why should I?

Loyalist respondents cited here demonstrate a strong understanding of the political dynamics underscoring their social exclusion and sense of abandonment. When similarly commenting on exprisoner disenfranchisement, another loyalist exprisoner suggests that the aforementioned state practices are spearheaded by, and in the political interests of, the two largest Unionist parties (the DUP and Ulster Unionist Party). According to him,

They see that as coming down strongly against the IRA. But they do it with a nod and a wink to their own [ex-prisoner] community: “Don’t think we mean you. It may affect you, but we don’t really mean you.” Basically they don’t care.

Ultimately, while claiming to be leading in the peace process, the rejection they feel from elected Unionist officials undermines loyalist exprisoner’s faith in that very process. According to one exprisoner, “the only thing that’s going to sort that out is when they [ex-prisoners] all die off.” Another loyalist explains how while former paramilitary prisoners may receive “a pat on the back from the Justice Minister” for leading in “restorative justice programs,” there is a perception of exploitation, since “that’s the same people who can’t go to America with their families; who can’t get house insurance; who can’t adopt a child—all because of their political background.”

Others suggest that some exprisoners’ personal interest in the continuation of peace funding, made especially integral in the context of their political, social, and economic marginalization, often takes a greater priority than actually effecting conflict transformation. Respondents from the community and public sectors concur that the results of excombatant reintegration and peacebuilding in particular have consequently been quite ambiguous. Exprisoners are essentially given the message not to

join the political process, but…apply for a bit of funding and you can start this community organization, so you’ve got a job and an income…. When we look at the thousands and thousands of pounds that have been pumped into West Belfast, and we’re no better off….¹¹ So what was that money doing all those years…? [I]f we still have young people doing racist attacks and sectarian attacks, then what was it achieving?

The overreliance of former paramilitary prisoners on the voluntary sector for employment and social status is, in important respects, counterproductive. Other respondents—including loyalist exprisoners involved in peacebuilding—describe a situation in which peace monies are regularly extorted by hardline elements that use the threat and use of violence to sustain a stream of revenue. Apparently, it is assumed that if authorities witness bouts of violence and disorder, the threat remains real and thus the services of exparamilitary prisoners in peacekeeping remain warranted. As one loyalist exprisoner maintains, “If other ones are seeing that violence is being rewarded, what incentive does that give them to stop the violence?” A community worker from the Short Strand area of East Belfast offers his own allegation of loyalist extortion of peace monies:

I see some of them who are very positive, without a doubt. But I see others, who are called ‘community leaders’ who are agitators…. If the UVF tell them to send kids down to smash cars up, they will do it. In fact, I was talking with them one time, and said “since you’re saying kids are causing trouble because there’s sectarian squabbling and you’re getting no money into your community, why don’t we make a joint effort to get money into our communities in general?” When it comes to it, they don’t go through with it. They think that by causing trouble at the interfaces, the British Government will pour more money into their communities. They will get a community worker and a paid job.

Incidentally, the preceding statement reflects a dynamic that is seemingly taken for granted but nonetheless important: the very fact that a self-proclaimed hardline republican would be conversing with former loyalist paramilitaries, who might have killed him twenty years prior, reflects evidence of the impressive depth of conflict transformation that has occurred. At the same time, the marginal social locations occupied by exprisoners outside community-based projects, restricting access to alternative agencies, help shape counterproductive, self-interested practices and motivations to maintain status within the shadows of the political apparatus—especially given the increasing uncertainty of funding amid the UK’s neoliberal and isolationist turn at the time of writing. One respondent, who works at a youth-focused, cross-community organization, similarly suggested that an exprisoner community leader in North Belfast organized attacks on a Protestant estate to escalate talks over peace money. Ironically, one loyalist he implicated was the same identified by another nationalist respondent as an important person in grassroots, cross-community peacebuilding networks. (Somewhat ironically, the same loyalist exprisoner was attacked by rival UDA members shortly before the interview, following his alleged complicity in a nonfatal shooting of a “dissident loyalist.”)¹² The same interviewee referred to loyalist leaders’ tenuous promise to monitor the behavior of loyalist crowds in order to obtain funding and state permission for annual sectarian bonfires. He asserts that “the loyalists want violence [at ethno-political and ethno-sectarian events]. People will throw money at them to stop it.” Another respondent claims that a somewhat similar dynamic takes place within republican communities, in which “some guys keep dissident groups going to keep their [British] informant positions.”

Without rationalizing aggressive behavior and criminality, it is important to acknowledge that excombatant and paramilitary influence occurs within broader contexts of exclusion over which neither they nor their broader working-class communities have much control. Such contexts include not only state policies targeting former combatants specifically, but the broader persistence of poverty and inopportunity in the communities in which they reside and which have historically experienced disproportionate sectarian and political violence. Respondents emphasize how poor conditions in working-class communities substantially impact the political mentalities and practices of (former) paramilitaries. Loyalists, for example, while elaborating on the deprivation experienced within their neighborhoods, espouse a belief that the largest Unionist party exploits them to maintain order while ignoring the underlying social and economic problems which compound intercommunity tensions and episodic (low-intensity) violence¹³:

The DUP doesn’t care about the working class community. They only care about us when it comes to getting the votes. They need to be coming in [to our communities]. They can ring us and say “there’s trouble….” Fine, we go. But if trouble goes on…, “it was your fault” or “you didn’t help it.”

According to another exprisoner respondent, “people know that politicians aren’t interested in fixing things…. They’re more interested in bickering about things that doesn’t really matter…[like] the education of our children.” According to respondents who observe (ex)paramilitary activities from the outside, moreover, the deficit in services and opportunities for working-class Protestants actually sustains a bedrock for pseudo-paramilitary power. According to one respondent, because of the neglect of the issues of concern especially prevalent in working-class communities by Unionist and British politicians in particular, there is “a level of community support or at least acquiescence that allows [paramilitary elements]…to be in that place [of community influence].” The marginalization of working-class communities, while helping maintain some extent of neoparamilitary influence in one sense, also more broadly compounds the economic and social dislocation of former paramilitary prisoners who are simultaneously targeted by policies intended to permanently criminalize and disenfranchise them. The fact that there “has been no peace dividend” in terms of economic and social development for the working classes—as put by several respondents from both ethnoreligious communities—combined with exparamilitary prisoners’ perceived unfair treatment by the state, helps intensify the latter’s resolve to maintain power and control on neighborhood levels independent or, in spite, of the state.

Discussion

This study sought to trace the reconfigurations and/or reproductions of former combatants’ ethnocultural masculinities in a society emerging from conflict and link such phenomena to broader political and social conditions. Findings illustrate how exparamilitary prisoners serve both productive and disruptive functions in the social and political stability of peace in Northern Ireland. In certain respects, findings mirror those from previous studies (McAuley, Tonge, and Shirlow 2010; Rolston 2007; Shirlow et al. 2005), which indicate how some exparamilitary prisoners consistently show genuine effort in facilitating cross-community cooperation, albeit on nonpolitical—or “practical”—matters. At the same time, according to our data, the extent of the “transformative role of former prisoners in community-based reintegration” (Dwyer 2012) is actually quite limited. To some degree, the contention that funding community organizations run by former combatants “replicates societal divisions” and reflect “ethnosocial power structures of paramilitarism” (Edwards and McGrattan 2013, 353) is, in certain respects, supported by the findings. Yet motivations to maintain such power structures are ultimately rooted in cultures of semimilitarized masculinities, state practices of exclusion, and social immobility in the working-class communities in which former paramilitaries reside. Male excombatants’ reassertion of power on neighborhood levels are rooted not only in mentalities of political threat (Rolston 2006; Tonge 2002)—but also by cultural or masculinist motivations (power, control, etc.) that pervade the broader society, including ethnopolitical elite. Even among those former male paramilitaries who contribute positively to local peacebuilding initiatives, normative masculinities rooted in histories of violence underscore the “legitimacy” of their social power.

Former paramilitary prisoners tend to rely on the voluntary sector for income and social status, which is largely a result of their formal exclusion from employment and social entitlements. In one study, approximately 55% of exprisoner respondents in Northern Ireland acknowledged being denied employment due to their history of imprisonment; 81% of loyalists from the same study stated that they experience economic problems (Jamieson, Shirlow, and Grounds 2010, 28, 32). Rather than being passive in processes of their marginalization, pseudo-paramilitary networks, including exprisoners simultaneously involved in productive, community-based organizations, attempt to reclaim autonomy and status through ethnomasculinist practices of community control. In this respect, findings illustrate how postconflict institutions which fail to address issues of gender and class inequities and promote a more generally inclusive society undermine positive reconfigurations or transitions in ethnocultures of masculinity. In this case, such dynamics compound the mutual mistrust and resentment between republican and loyalist excombatants and the broader Catholic and Protestant communities rooted, at the same time, in the lack of any comprehensive, state-based mechanism for reconciliation and dealing with the past (Rolston 2006).¹⁴ Partial memories of conflict which exclude the crimes of in-group members and celebrate the sacrifices of fallen comrades remain integral in reconstituting the ethnoreligious solidarity and mutual exclusiveness of the two main communities (Volkan 1998; Zerubavel 1995).

Moreover, ethnopolitical elite, by their unwillingness or inability to promote social inclusion and reconciliation on the one hand, and exclusion of exprisoners from legitimate institutions, on the other, ensure not only the reliance of the latter on grassroots peacebuilding positions for income and social status but also sustains the very paramilitary networks to which they are variably linked and thus their capacity—paradoxically—to disrupt broader peacebuilding processes. Former paramilitary prisoners remain both “inside” and “outside” the political apparatus, deprived of formal channels of social mobility yet active in processes of informal—and sometimes violent—social control (see also Ashe and Harland 2014). Due in part to perceptions of the reformed judicial process as too slow and generally ineffective, there is some—albeit limited—support for violent vigilantism, which is used by paramilitary elements as much to reassert control over local communities, settle personal disputes, or provide cover for criminal activities (e.g., extortion) as to exercise some anachronistic form of justice (Knox 2002; Harland 2011; Ashe and Harland 2014). In some instances, young people charged with “antisocial behavior” are beaten and/or shot in the knees and ankles; many have also been forced to leave the country or face the prospect of being killed.

More generally, the social and political status of exprisoners remains contingent on sustaining paramilitary networks and, concomitantly—and ironically—their strategic place in the “peace consultancy industry.” As several respondents acknowledge, being a former paramilitary prisoner has become in itself a qualifying rationale for participation in community-based initiatives (see also Edwards and McGrattan 2011, 2013). Yet their overdependency on the voluntary sector raises the incentive for some exparamilitary prisoners to sustain the very need for their “peace work,” which may be effectively communicated to state authorities and external funders through extortion and violence. Hence, the overreliance on employment in the community sector, combined with their entrenchment within semimilitarized cultures of masculinity and sustained commitment to traditional, ethnopolitical objectives restricts the maturation of the peace process. At the same time, (former) paramilitary control on neighborhood levels is facilitated by politicians’ social and economic neglect of the broader working-class communities most impacted by legacies of violence, opening a power vacuum filled by pseudo-paramilitary elements. Holland and Rabrenovic (2016, 16) quote a prominent public official from East Belfast, who explains how the ongoing control paramilitaries exert in working-class loyalist neighborhoods “comes from the disconnect between [middle-class] political unionism and [working-class] loyalism; the paramilitaries become the default to get things done, to make things happen in their community.”

At the same time, the exclusion of women from grassroots, “community-based” organizations, corresponding to the reentrenchment of the power of former male paramilitaries is especially worrisome when considering that women had dominated grassroots peace work prior to the 1998 Agreement (Ashe and Harland 2014, 754; on the central role of women in peacemaking more generally, see Levin and Rabrenovic 2004, 187–94). Such women could thus offer potentially valuable perspectives on important challenges to cross-community peacebuilding efforts while bringing the concerns of women to the forefront of political discourse. Women are especially capable of articulating the limitations in how “conflict resolution is currently devised and conducted,” with particular insight into related problems connecting the private and public spheres (Gilmartin 2015, 72). An increasing prevalence of domestic violence and alcohol abuse, for example, are highlighted by nationalist women excombatants in Gilmartin’s study as indicative of the limitations of the peace process and the internal community struggles which pose negative implications for social and political transformation. Thus, their marginalization and silencing on both state and grassroots levels undermines “a more transformative and inclusive approach towards conflict resolution” (Gilmartin 2015, 72). While Sinn Fein has put more emphasis on gender equality than the unionist parties, moreover, feminist politics has not gained significant traction even among this relatively “progressive” nationalist party (Gilmartin 2015).

The marginalization of women from working-class communities will only be exacerbated by impending budget cuts imposed by the British government, which will have “a disproportionate impact on women’s access to resources, security and safety,” according to the Women’s Policy Group of Northern Ireland (2016, 4). The problems experienced by women in working-class communities already match—and in some cases exceed—the same facing men and former combatants. A study by Lazenbatt, Lynch, and O’Neil (2001) on women’s health in a socially and economically underserved area of Belfast found that “mental health difficulties were self-reported by over half of the survey group, ranging from severe stress (62 percent), depression (53 percent) to anxiety-worry (24 percent)” (Ashe and Harland 2014, 754). Yet the prevalence of such problems among women—and women’s problems generally—receive little priority among politicians and nonstate organizations alike (Gilmartin 2015). The structures of power between groups of men—namely, between ethnopolitical elite and most exparamilitary prisoners¹⁵—is inextricably linked to the double exclusion of women; they comprise marginal positions in the major political institutions constitutive of the peace while relegated mostly to secondary and more hidden roles in the community sector. The reentrenchment of localized, pseudo-paramilitary power presupposes women’s exclusion in this double sense.

Additionally, evidence of state hostility toward the exprisoner community reflects a broader trend of domination politics spearheaded by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. Because excombatants are the “most visible concentration of everything that people feel about the conflict,” including resentment and blame, political discourse surrounding “prisoner release and reintegration is one that tends to highlight and exacerbate the differences between the dominant ideologies” of opposing ethnopolitical groups and is symptomatic of a key obstacle in the “struggle to resolve these differences in a common vision of the future” (Gormally 2001, 6). For example, according to loyalist exprisoner interviewees, Unionist politicians support exclusionary policies in order to “target the IRA”—as put by one respondent—while accepting that loyalist exprisoners are also impacted in similar, detrimental ways. Such a trend is not coincidental to the ideological and historical differences between the mainstream Unionist and Nationalist parties: while the former have historically kept arm’s-length distance from armed combatants and are overwhelmingly middle class, Sinn Fein comprised largely of former IRA insurgents. Correspondingly, the criminalization of exprisoners is intended to serve one set of ethnopolitical parties (Unionists) over the other (Nationalists). The disenfranchisement of exprisoners is an example of an attempt to institutionalize power of one ethnopolitical bloc and give it “moral grounding” (Mitchell 2008, 2) overagainst claims of legitimacy by “the other.” In general, problems posed by the ongoing influence of excombatants on neighborhood levels are not unrelated to the hypermasculine political strategies of domination by those intent on capitalizing on broader societal resentment and blame of the exprisoner population, which is unfairly seen as solely representative of the violence of the past (Gormally 2001).¹⁶ In this sense, exprisoners have served as pawns in a zero-sum political game, and they are aware of it (see also Mitchell 2008; Rolston 2006; Shirlow 2012).

Still, it is important to emphasize that terminating the policies which stigmatize and criminalize former paramilitary prisoners by itself will unlikely result in the decentering of ethnocultures of hypermasculinity and a reversal in the corresponding marginalization of women. Broader investment in working-class communities’ social and economic infrastructure, systematic efforts to change the normativity of ethnomasculinist cultures and empower the political voices of women, and cooperation between political elite from both of the main communities on dealing with the past will all be essential in transforming Northern Ireland—and transitional societies generally—to a truly postconflict state.

While findings are specific to Northern Ireland, they likely have important implications for other (post)conflict sites as well. For example, as discussed by Roxanne Krystalli as part of University of Massachusetts–Boston’s Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights in 2016, recent observations from Colombia—a “postconflict society” with deep class, ethnic, and gender hierarchies—suggest that many demobilized insurgents and extrastate paramilitaries later join criminal “neoparamilitary groups,” moving “in and out of conflict.” Such a dynamic signals the possibility that similar sociostructural and cultural dynamics documented here are at play there and likely in other societies emerging from conflict. As Brubaker and Laitin (1998) suggest, theoretical generalizations are best supported through a systematic comparison of qualitative, in-depth case studies of particular (post) conflict societies. Through such comparisons, wherein unique geographical and cultural phenomena are accounted for, the explanatory capacity of the combined evidence of social processes which cut across diverse societies will be enhanced. Additional studies should critically assess the more global applicability of theoretical implications of findings documented here regarding excombatant exclusion/inclusion and relations of power along intersecting lines of class and gender for prospects of peacebuilding and restorative justice.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Neil Jarman, Liza Weinstein, and the editor and blind reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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