Peacemaking strategies in Northern Ireland

Competing theories of conflict management can be characterized as the settlement approach, which advocates issue-oriented, zero-sum negotiation and bargaining to achieve compromise, and the resolution approach, which prescribes relationship-oriented facilitation to achieve positive-sum, integrative resolution. Detailed study of actual peacemaking strategies employed in Northern Ireland since 1969 demonstrates two interdependent and complementary practical approaches in use there which mirror these theoretical positions: the cultural approach, comprising initiatives to improve the relationship between two alienated communities, and the structural approach, which embraces political attempts to negotiate new structures of governance for the region. Examples of each approach are also presented as case-studies: the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, and the political negotiations of the Brooke Initiative in 1990-91. The interreliance between the practical approaches in Northern Ireland suggests ways for improving complementarity at the theoretical level, by means of a flexible and inductive model of conflict management.