Reconciling Divided States

Peace Processes in Ireland and Korea

Dong Jin Kim, David Mitchell, Dong Jin Kim, David Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000520606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a distinctive perspective on peace processes by comparatively analysing two cases which have rarely been studied in tandem, Ireland and Korea.

The volume examines and compares Ireland and Korea as two peace/conflict areas. Despite their differences, both places are marked by a number of overlaid states of division: a political border in a geographical unit (an island and a peninsula); an antagonistic relationship within the population of those territories; an international relationship recovering from past asymmetry and colonialism; and divisions within the main groupings over how to address these relationships. Written by academics and practitioners from Europe and East Asia, and guided by the concepts of peacebuilding and reconciliation, the chapters assess peace efforts at all levels, from the elite to grassroot organisations. Topics discussed include: historical parallels; modern debates over the legacy of the past; contemporary constitutional and security issues; civil society peacebuilding in relation to faith, sport, and women's activism; and the role of economic assistance. The book brings Ireland and Korea into a rich dialogue which highlights the successes and shortcomings of both peace processes

This book will be of interest to students of Peace and Conflict Studies, Irish Politics, Korean Politics, and International Relations.

1 Peace processes and comparative research in Ireland, Korea, and beyond

Dong Jin Kim and David Mitchell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003054276-1

On 10 April 1998, political parties in Northern Ireland, as well as the British and Irish governments, reached the ‘Good Friday’ or ‘Belfast’ Agreement. This accord was designed to bring an end to the three decades-long violent conflict known as ‘the Troubles.’ Two years later, an equally dramatic peace development occurred in East Asia. For the first time since the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945, the leaders of North and South Korea met in Pyongyang and issued the ‘June 15 Joint Declaration’ which laid out a roadmap for peace and the unification of Korea. The Norwegian Nobel committee recognized both events. The 1998 Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Irish nationalist leader, John Hume, and British unionist leader, David Trimble, while the 2000 Peace Prize was awarded to South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung.¹

However, in both Ireland and Korea, the euphoria surrounding the conclusion of agreements gave way to deep frustration during implementation. The Northern Ireland peace process faced gridlock over the failure of the paramilitaries to disarm, the electoral growth of hard-line parties, controversy over reforms of policing, and many other issues. The Korean peace process, once seemingly on the cusp of officially ending the Korean War, stagnated in the late 2000s due to multiple crises, including the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, the deterioration of relations between the United States and North Korea, and changes in South Korean policy towards North Korea. Unlike Northern Ireland, the Korean peace process seemed to be facing a total collapse.

Subsequent years brought breakthroughs and breakdowns in both contexts. After years of impasse in Northern Ireland, the two former ‘extremes,’ the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin, finally agreed to share power through the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement. However, conflict over cultural expression and rights as well as unresolved questions over how to deal with the legacy of the violence continued. In 2017, after ten years of power-sharing, partnership government collapsed for three years due to a souring of relations between the DUP and Sinn Féin, while the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 was widely perceived as threatening the peace process, first through the possible imposition of a ‘hard’ border in Ireland and later through the actual creation of trade barriers between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Meanwhile, from 2017, an unfreezing of the Korean peace process occurred, including historic summits between the then US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and his North Korean counterpart. North Korean participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea encouraged hope for the Korean peace process, but confrontation and provocation among the conflict parties persisted.

This brief review demonstrates two fundamental characteristics of peace processes. One is their unpredictable course. The other is that they face a similar entanglement of challenges – including dismantling security apparatuses, dealing with past atrocities, intra-group division, building new and inclusive political structures, and reconciling peoples – and provoke the same psychological and emotional responses: fragile hope and expectation vying with fear, insecurity, and mistrust. In Korea and Ireland, and all peace arenas, the greatest challenge is sustainability: maintaining the process after an agreement.

Building sustainable peace in the face of these realities is the central concern of this collection. This introductory chapter begins by setting out the interlocking guiding concepts of the book – peace processes, peacebuilding, and reconciliation – which are long established and studied in the peace studies field, and which together represent the transformation required in intractable conflicts such as those in Ireland and Korea. Then the rationale for the comparative study of peace is set out, before an introductory examination of the similarities and differences in the Irish and Korean cases. The final section provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Peace processes: Building peace towards reconciliation

The term ‘peace process’ appears to have originated among American diplomats involved in mediation in the Middle East in the 1970s (Saunders, 2001). During the 1990s, when negotiated settlements of armed conflicts proliferated, ‘peace process’ became popularized as a reference to accommodation between parties in a long-running conflict, and to the incremental practices of embedding peace. Darby and Mac Ginty (2008a: 3) describe ‘peace process’ as ‘a convenient term to describe persistent peace initiatives that develop beyond initial statements of intent and involve the main antagonists in a protracted conflict.’

Different peace processes address a similar range of problems including disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants, creating new political institutions, and transitional justice. Peace processes also tend to share common phases: secret dialogue, ceasefires, mutual recognition and statements of principles, negotiations, deadlines, agreement, and implementation periods (Darby and Mac Ginty, 2000; Tonge, 2014). However, as Tonge (2014: 6–7) cautions, ‘acceptance of the term “peace process” requires understanding that transitions towards non-violence and the permanent eradication of conflict are non-linear, subject to regression and rarely short.’ In other words, ‘all peace processes are experimental’ (Özerdem and Mac Ginty, 2019a: 1) and ‘there is no standard model of a peace process’ (p. 2). Aside from the objective characteristics of a peace process, the term is likely to be contested within any conflict arena. Opponents of peace processes will view that descriptor as propaganda designed to obscure what they view as an appeasement or surrender process.

Peace processes can entail unjust settlements which are dictated by the strongest actors at the time (Tonge, 2014: 24). A dilemma at the core of any peace process is how it may incentivize combatants to abandon violence, affirm opposing identities and aspirations, and achieve a win-win outcome, without cementing the structures and patterns of conflict, and rewarding militancy. A peace process is ‘a calculated attempt by the parties to recalibrate the conflict in order to lower the conflict costs’ (Özerdem and Mac Ginty, 2019a: 1), meaning that most peace processes aim to manage a conflict and are ill-suited to engendering a more radical transformation of identities or social structures in the short or even medium term, even if such transformation is the hoped-for direction of travel. That said, there are signs that the agenda of peace processes and agreements has broadened in the past two decades towards a more holistic understanding of conflict, including, for instance, gender and economic considerations (Özerdem and Mac Ginty, 2019a).

Contemporary peace processes have produced dramatically different outcomes. Some, such as South Africa and Northern Ireland, appear successful and have inspired actors in other conflict zones to consider if and how they may be emulated. In other cases, peace agreements have been followed by an intensification of violence; the Rwandan genocide, for instance, followed the Arusha peace accords, while the Oslo peace process between Israelis and Palestinians collapsed amid the Second Intifada. Peace processes can survive but become stagnant, breeding disillusionment among the public, and failing to fully eradicate violence and transform politics (Mac Ginty, 2006). Attempting to find a systematic way of evaluating peace processes, Özerdem and Mac Ginty (2019a: 4) offer a list of criteria against which processes may be judged: inter alia, the effectiveness of confidence-building measures; the level of third-party engagement; the ability of the accord to produce effective governance and deal with transitional justice issues; and the level of public, gender, and youth inclusion in the process. These authors argue, based on a wide review of cases, that these factors are important for peace process sustainability. This framework highlights the widening scope of peace processes, and of peace process scholarship.

‘Peacebuilding,’ the second guiding concept of the book, encompasses negotiations, accords, and implementation but has broader connotations, usually referring to all activity, at all levels, designed to avoid a relapse into conflict. The concept was promoted by United Nations (UN) Secretary General Boutros-Ghali’s (1992) report, An Agenda for Peace: ‘Peacemaking and peace-keeping are required to halt conflicts and preserve peace once it is attained. If successful, they strengthen the opportunity for post-conflict peace-building, which can prevent the recurrence of violence among nations and peoples’ (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). However, from the 1990s onwards, ‘peacebuilding’ become tainted by its widespread use as a synonym for liberal or neoliberal statebuilding driven by international actors, particularly the UN and Western donor countries. Liberal peacebuilding drew on the experience and intellectual heritage of Western states, and sought to apply individual rights, market economy, and democratic institutions in societies with no tradition of these on the assumption that this ‘toolkit’ would establish sustainable peace (Paris, 2004).

Criticisms of liberal peacebuilding include (1) liberal democracy, human rights, market values, and globalization are not necessarily universal; (2) rapid neoliberal economic reforms can be extremely disruptive, particularly in fragile economies, and among other damaging impacts, this disruption disproportionally affects women; (3) free elections in a society without traditions and foundations for democracy, or with deep communal divisions, may have the effect of emboldening extremists and heightening sectarian tensions; (4) liberal peacebuilding is top-down in that it is driven by the international actors in concert with local elites, and excludes grassroots community actors; (5) in cases like Iraq and Afghanistan, liberal peacebuilding has been associated with illiberal, coercive methods (Duncanson, 2016; Newman, Paris and Richmond, 2009; Mac Ginty, 2011). Numerous cases of UN-sponsored peacebuilding, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Timor-Leste, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Cyprus, Rwanda, and Nicaragua, have evidenced the shortcomings (Richmond and Pogodda, 2017; Paris, 2004).

Several advances in peacebuilding theory and practice, with overlapping themes, have been proposed which purport to avoid liberal peacebuilding’s pitfalls. Some scholars emphasize ‘the local’ and local legitimacy (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013), and eschew international templates in favour of context-specific approaches. The most robust peace, according to Richmond (2019), is likely to result from a positive and productive interaction between international peacebuilding and ‘peace formation,’ that is, local peace agency. De Coning (2018), Ricigliano (2012), and Ropers (2008) apply ‘systems thinking’ to peacebuilding, foregrounding how peacebuilding practice must account for how any conflict-affected context is a complex, interconnected and dynamic system. These writers also emphasize the local and expect peacebuilding to be an uncertain and open-ended, rather than a prescriptive and time-bound, enterprise. Feminist scholars advocate not only the inclusion of women in the construction of post-conflict orders but also the transformation of gender hierarchies and dynamics throughout both conflict-affected societies and the structures and practices of international peace actors (O’Reilly, 2013). Meanwhile, proponents of ‘strategic peacebuilding’ argue that sustainable peace requires the complementary activities of multiple types of actors: ‘peace building become strategic when actors at all levels, whether from below, above, inside, or out, begin to link and co-ordinate with differentiated spaces and processes to effect the wider desired change’ (Lederach and Appleby, 2010: 36). Much of this new thinking is reflected in the UN’s revised conceptualization of peacebuilding as ‘sustaining peace.’ This approach aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals and envisages a holistic and coordinated process, at all stages of conflict, to address the root causes of conflict, and promote socio-economic development and reconciliation (United Nations, 2016).

In all critiques, liberal peacebuilding is found to be ill-suited to creating positive intergroup relations after violent conflict. Reconciliation, the third guiding concept of the book, entails ‘changing the motivations, goals, beliefs, attitudes and emotions of the great majority of society members regarding the conflict, the nature of the relationship between the parties, and the parties themselves’ (Bar-Tal and Bennink, 2004: 12). Liberal peacebuilding and traditional diplomacy may help reduce violence but are inadequate to address these psychological and relational dimensions, as Lederach (1997: 23–24) explains:

Conflicting groups live in close geographic proximity. They have direct experience of violent trauma that they associate with their perceived enemies and that is sometimes tied to a history of grievance and enmity that ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Peace processes and comparative research in Ireland, Korea, and beyond
• 2 The colonial origins of the conflicts in Ireland and Korea
• 3 Memory, reconciliation, and mourning: Breaking the cycle of violence and building peace in Ireland
• 4 The Korean War and public diplomacy: Dilemmas of remembering the forgotten war
• 5 Peace agreements and elite-level peacemaking in Ireland and Korea: Governance, security, and context
• 6 Ecumenical engagements for building civil society: The Corrymeela Community and the Korea Christian Academy
• 7 The peacebuilding role of women within and between Ireland and Korea
• 8 Sport for peace: Comparing contributions and constraints in Ireland and Korea
• 9 Supporting peacebuilding through socio-economic development in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland: Sharing lessons for the Korean peace process
• 10 The geopolitics, structures of division, and just peace in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Korea: Comparative reflections for mutual empowerment
• Index