'Good Friday Agreement'. Perspectives on the Northern Irish peace process

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 2,3, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: The Troubles in Northern Ireland were one of the main concerns for both British and Irish politics ever since the late 1960s. However, the roots of the conflict reach back centuries and have been the cause for immense bloodshed and more than 3,200 casualties.These earlier stages of the conflict as well as its course in general are to be neglected in this paper, whereas the emphasis is to be on the Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement of 1998 as the political marking line between war and peace, as well as the developments up to the present. Although the end of violence as primary goal of the Agreement was largely achieved in most parts of Northern Ireland, there are still developments that run contrary to a notion of peace. These developments will subsequently be analyzed to identify weaknesses of the Good Friday Agreement and make statements about the success of the peace process possible and ultimately make assumptions about the hindrances of said peace process to this day. The indicator used to make said assumptions will be Wolff's post-agreement reconstruction model which was already used to analyze the progress of the peace process in 2002, which lead to a very cautious prognosis for the coming years. This paper's task is therefore to apply the post-agreement reconstruction model to today's situation to make a statement about the success of the Good Friday Agreement more than 18 years after it was signed. Due to the shortness of this paper, an emphasis will be laid on social, psychological and security indicators for the success of post-agreement reconstruction. Furthermore, the particular contents of the Belfast Agreement in their entirety are not to be listed here. However, for an analysis of the current situation in Northern Ireland it is necessary to consider at least some of the crucial points that contain the potential to obstruct the peace process or further entrench the sectarian division of Northern Ireland.