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		[2007] 5 Web JCLI

Intersectionality In Transition: Lessons From Northern Ireland

Eilish Rooney

School of Sociology & Applied Social Studies
Associate: Transitional Justice Institute
University of Ulster

e.rooney@ulster.ac.uk

Copyright © 2007 Eilish Rooney
First published in Web Journal of Current Legal Issues

The initial research for this article was undertaken with support from the Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster and developed as a Visiting Scholar on the Feminist Legal Theory Programme, Emory University Law School, 2006

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Summary

The ‘war on terror’ has revived international and academic interest in Northern Ireland’s transition and in how the British state managed ‘terrorist threat’ during the conflict. A ‘community relations’ narrative centring on dysfunctional sectarian opposition primarily between working-class Catholic and Protestant men is a key ingredient in the discursive management of this conflict. Social identity discourses in diverse conflicted societies are integral to local and global histories of nation-state formation and the acquisition of power over political and material resources involved. The experiences of women in these circumstances are generally rendered invisible. Such social identities appear to be male-only territory where women rarely feature whilst gender and socio-economic inequalities are also invisible and largely unexamined. This article argues that intersectionality theory provides important conceptual tools for analysing transitional societies. It enables us to see how women’s invisibility in conflict discourses operates to the disadvantage of the most marginalized people. Furthermore, this analysis provides pragmatic and theoretical lessons helping to illuminate the role of law and policy in transitions.

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Contents

Introduction
Seeing Women
Theory in Place
Gender in a state
Transitional Conclusions

Bibliography

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Introduction

The ‘war on terror’ has revived international interest in the conflict in Northern Ireland (Campbell and Connolly 2003). ('Northern Ireland' is a contested designation; many who oppose or question the union with Great Britain refer to ‘the North of Ireland’.) In the aftermath of 9/11, Prime Minister Blair quickly claimed that the British government’s expertise in handling ‘terrorism’ in Northern Ireland would be made available to the Bush administration. Discussions of the London bombing (7 July 2005) frequently included comparisons with Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing campaigns in Britain, with contributions invited from ‘experts’ on the basis of their experience of ‘terrorism’ and the Northern Irish conflict. This conflict, which was characterized as a nineteenth-century anachronism in the modern world (Deane 1991), at the start of the twenty-first century is now considered by some as a ‘model’ of how democratic states might manage ‘terrorist’ threat. A key element in the discursive management of the Northern Irish conflict is a community relations narrative centred on dysfunctional sectarian opposition primarily between working-class Catholic and Protestant men (Rooney 2006). Women rarely feature whilst the gendered and social class dimensions of these ‘identities’ are also invisible and largely unexamined in mainstream academic research.

Social identities in conflicts such as those linked to race, ethnicity or sect often derive from particular colonial histories of state (or regime) formation. Complex conflicts and transitions in these societies are characterized in reductive terms of oppositions between groups designated as ‘different’ from each other on the bases of race, ethnicity or sect. Indeed such identities are constituted by and obtain political significance and everyday meaning through processes of state formation. Consider, for example, the role of race in the apartheid regime in South Africa or the ethnic and religious dimension of conflict in the Balkans or in Afghanistan. The significance of social identities formed in these diverse circumstances is integral to local and global histories of nation-state formation and the acquisition of power over political and material resources involved. The particular experiences of women in these societies are generally rendered invisible. Implicitly social identities appear to be male-only territory. When women’s lives come to public attention in conflicts or transitions the attention often serves the interests of dominant political agendas and hardly ever the interests of the marginalized women concerned. Evident inroads have been made into assessing the impact, form and experience of transition for women (Orford 2006; Ní Aoláin 2006; Bell and O’Rourke 2007). Building on previous work, this article argues that intersectionality theory provides important analytical and conceptual tools for enabling us to understand gendered and social class dimensions of social identities in transition. It enables us to see how women’s invisibility in these discourses operates to the disadvantage of the most marginalized people. Furthermore, this analysis helps to illuminate the role of law and policy in relation to critical questions of recognition and redistribution in transitional societies.

At a time when the narrative emerging in relation to the transition in Iraq is one of violent sectarian and ethnic opposition between Sunni and Shia Muslims and Kurds (women are again invisible) this article contends that intersectional analysis can help deepen understanding of such complex situations. It contributes to a growing body of critical reflection on contemporary peace processes in the context of heightened political instability when transitional justice is becoming a model for the ‘lobal rule of law’ (Teitel 2003, p 894). It does so from the perspective of Northern Ireland’s transition, which is the subject of a comprehensive critique within the transitional justice literature (Campbell and Ní Aoláin 2002-03). For instance, the claim that Northern Ireland provides a model of how democratic states can successfully manage ‘terrorist threat’ is critiqued through an analysis of the British state’s decision to militarize the management of civil disturbance in Northern Ireland at a key early stage (Campbell and Connolly 2003). The role of women, which is decisive in the curfew event central to this analysis, is mentioned only in passing whilst the authors conduct a forensic analysis of criminal proceedings that followed military action. They demonstrate that military action had an adverse impact in terms of brutality and effectiveness. The Catholic Falls district, where the curfew was imposed, was one of the most impoverished areas of Northern Ireland at the time. Almost forty years later, it remains amongst the most deprived areas (Noble, et al, 2005). Arguably the Falls area posed a greater security threat to the state after the curfew than before. The argument of this article is that bringing women’s agency into view and tackling poverty experienced by people living in areas such as this is crucial to building social stability. This is not solely a problem of disadvantage experienced by Catholics in Northern Ireland. Recent statistics reveal that despite an economic upturn the poorest Protestant areas are experiencing deepening levels of poverty (CAJ 2006a). Current statistics indicate a reduction in religious and political inequalities amongst the poorest people in Northern Ireland not because things are improving for the Catholic poor but because the poorest Protestants are closing the gap. There is a levelling downwards. Deepening levels of Protestant poverty allied to alienation from political accommodation may yet pose a threat within a state whose status is now subject to the vicissitudes of the ballot box.⁽¹⁾

Pragmatic and theoretical lessons from Northern Ireland’s transition are set out in three parts. ‘Part one: seeing women’ explores the invisibility of women and gender in conflict narratives. The role of women in conflict narratives is a precarious one. For the most part they are an invisible presence. On occasion the female figure is hailed into prominence and functions in a symbolic way that neither disturbs the dominant masculinity of these discourses nor questions women’s stereotypical depiction as victim or peace-maker. This precarious role is also vital. It sustains a narrative fiction that conflicts are gender-free. Following from this, ‘Part two: theory in place’ probes the benefits of intersectionality theory as a way to interrogate identity oppositions in transitional societies (in this case, between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland). In this instance, as is generally the case when conflicts are described as sectarian, sect implicitly references the historical role of religion in state formation whereby one religiously defined political group dominates in the exercise of state power. The legacy of this dynamic in Northern Ireland is most evident in the reported indices of social deprivation that continue to show deep-rooted patterns of political and religious inequalities (CAJ 2006a). This article calls for an analytic approach that begins the work of integrating regimes of state formation with gender inequality in order to comprehend the challenges facing law and policy in transitions. This work is undertaken in a preliminary manner in ‘Part three: gender in a State’ which examines the implications of this analysis for feminist theory and politics premised as they are on the unitary if categorically unstable category ‘woman’ (Bottomley 2004). Intersectional analysis exposes the ‘illusory sameness’ suggested by the very terms (such as Catholic and Protestant) used to describe dimensions of inequality and discrimination in Northern Ireland. The article develops Joan Scott’s insight that “identities don’t pre-exist their strategic political invocations” (Scott 2001, p 285). ‘Strategic political invocations’ of Catholic and Protestant (and ‘woman’ for that matter) in the Northern Irish context illustrate and affirm her point. Furthermore, intersectionality functions here as a conceptual framework or heuristic device for asking questions otherwise not asked, for seeing women otherwise hidden from view (or seen only within a certain frame) and for describing the kinds of things to consider especially in the transitional process in Northern Ireland when sect, and the relationship with the state that it denotes, is being institutionalized in post-agreement mechanisms of governance. (The NI Assembly functions through ‘weighted majorities’ based upon unionist (mainly Protestant) and nationalist (mainly Catholic) political representation. See Rooney 2000.) Just as critical race feminists in the United States devised intersectionality as a tool to elucidate how gender is concealed within discourse on ‘race’, it can be applied to similar effect in relation to sect in Northern Ireland. The article ends with ‘Transitional Conclusions’ where what has gone before is drawn together in the context of seeing the ‘liberal democratic state’ of Northern Ireland as a ‘moment’ of European modernity. Postcolonial citizen state relations in Northern Ireland are living evidence of the state’s founding fault-lines of gender, sect and class under pressure since the middle of the twentieth century. In other words, Northern Ireland is a most apposite site for the deployment of intersectionality.

Initially, it may seem an unlikely location within which to apply this complex theoretical paradigm (McCall 2005). Intersectionality, with its triad of ‘race/class/gender’ originally designed by African American feminists in a US context, poses fundamental challenges in the transitional context.   (For the emergence of ‘post-intersectionality’ see Chang and Culp, Jr, 2002, and Ehrenreich 2002.)  McCall argues that intersectionality points up the limitations of ‘gender’ as a single analytical category and is the “most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies … has made” (McCall 2005, p 1771). Billed as the latest ‘fast travelling theory’, the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality (Knapp 2004), that promises so much by way of an escape from the cul-de-sac of disconnected, deconstructing differences, appears to be heading for a roundabout in the metropolis of feminist theory in the US. Or so it seems – from a distance. The ‘distance’ that Northern Ireland, like other transitional societies, is from any site of theory production is all important. Firstly, it is a society in transition from over thirty years of violent political conflict involving sect and politics in state formation (in this context the intersectional triad becomes gender/sect/class). Whilst the conflict has not been about religion per se, in that it has not been a dispute concerning doctrinal or theological matters, it cannot be understood without recognition of the historical interplay of sect and politics in state-building (Brewer and Higgins 1998). Intersectionality theory in this situation is useful because it brings women to the fore and gender and class into play in understanding intersecting dimensions of inequality and discrimination that are constitutive of state–citizen relations.

In the Northern Irish context, the virtual invisibility of women in the conflict discourse is reflected in the equality agenda, where the focus is on resilient unemployment differentials between Catholic and Protestant men. Women, and the impacts of these differentials on their lives, are unexamined. The move of intersectionality foregrounds this erasure and claims that attention should be paid to women’s equality in these circumstances. Finally, the poorest people suffer the most in conflicts. Whilst women’s groups from poor neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland are show-cased to international conferences and in the feminist literature for admiration, women in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods bear the heaviest burdens (Rooney 2002). Intersectionality further focuses the spotlight on these women and supports the argument that addressing the corrosive social impacts of women’s poverty offers a strategic approach towards building durable stability in a state formed on the basis of sect and the political affiliation it denotes. Research to support this strategic approach comes from a study of conflict-related trauma experienced by second generation young people where respondents stressed the positive importance and influence of women’s parenting (Droichead an Dóchais 2005). The application of intersectionality in transitional contexts has the pragmatic aim to introduce women’s equality into the frame. An integral theoretical aim is to show how including women and developing gender sensitive analyses destabilizes the hegemonic masculinity of these discourses. This helps to deepen understanding of contemporary conflicts and related processes of transitional justice and the role of integrated regimes of inequality in all of this.

Seeing Women

On a common-sense level women may be assumed to be a peripheral concern of states dealing with ‘terrorist threat’, given the dominance of men and masculinity invested in the construct and concrete experiences of both ‘threat’ and ‘security’. However, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and in the ‘transitional’ phase of setting up democratic institutions there, Northern Ireland became a destination for high level political and civic delegations of Iraqi women. Thus, for instance, the Iraqi women’s visit to Belfast in April 2005 was organized by the Iraqi Women’s National Commission (details supplied by Ann Hope).The delegates come to learn how women in a violent conflict, ‘divided’ by religion and politics, manage to overcome division and unite in common cause. In these visits the Iraqi delegates meet with women’s groups from working-class Catholic and Protestant districts. These women’s groups have also been the subject of an influential feminist literature that highlights how women in different violent conflicts overcome division and build alliances in what appear to be the most unlikely circumstances (e.g. see Roulston and Davies, eds, 2000; and Cockburn 1998). The women’s groups visited by the Iraqi delegations organize in neighbourhoods where social need indices place them amongst some of the most deprived areas in Western Europe (Hamilton and Fisher, eds, 2002). The groups themselves limp along on insecure funding dependent upon state and state-related agency support that generally stipulates a ‘community relations’ (i.e. Catholic–Protestant) dimension to their work (Rooney 2002). The appalling degree of poverty experienced by women in these neighbourhoods is not an issue of public debate. The focus of the equality agenda is the persistent unemployment differentials between Catholic and Protestant men; Catholic men remain twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestant men (OFM/DFM 2004). In the West Belfast constituency, the location of the curfew area referenced earlier, almost half of the electoral wards have child poverty levels of over 80 per cent (Rooney 2004). The impact of these and other inequalities upon the poorest women has never been comprehensively studied. Yet women in poverty are the most likely to bear the burdens of rearing children alone, to be in the low paid and unofficial labour market, to have lower disposable income and, when married, to have a smaller share of and less control over family incomes (Daly 1989). Almost two-thirds of the income support claimants in Northern Ireland are women (Moore, et al, 2002). Furthermore, there is a correlation between inequality and poverty and areas that have “suffered the most and been most involved in the conflict” (Hillyard, Rolston and Tomlinson 2005, p xvii). The areas that posed the highest security threat to the state during the conflict are those with the deepest levels of deprivation. The social and generational impacts of political and religious inequalities fuelled the conflict. This is recognized in the equality strand of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement where the first two dimensions of inequality named are those of religious belief and political opinion.(2) Women are the poorest group in any category referenced in the legislation. However, on the matter of women’s poverty there is a resounding silence not alone in public debate but also in the literature. Thus, for example, a recent landmark review of fair employment legislation in NI contains no chapter on women (see Osborne and Shuttleworth, eds, 2004). There is in this publication no page numbered reference for ‘women’ in the index. One chapter explores patterns of social mobility by religion and gender, where ‘gender’ is equivalent to ‘neutral’ sex difference (Miller 2004). Women are simply not on the equality radar. Where they do come into view they do so, as already noted, as uniquely able to overcome discredited sectarian politics.

The tasks of addressing women’s inequalities in a transitioning society are complex and vital. The first thing is to notice the invisibility of women and gender in explanations of the conflict itself, then to see how this invisibility is reflected in the equality agenda. Intersectional aspects of recognition and redistribution in feminist critical race theory are useful for the analysis of gender inequalities in these contexts. Of first importance are the forms of concealment that constitute and govern public discourse and their implications for feminist thinking particularly in relation to women’s political agency and coalition building across intersections of gender, sect and class. Being invisible in the discourse, or being assumed to be included though not mentioned, is one form of concealment. Mentioning ‘women’ in the literature whilst failing to bring the concept of gender into play is another, as is the focus upon gender as a neutral category which bypasses women. This treats gender as having evenly balanced outcomes for women and men and is the approach adopted in its consultation document by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, see OFM/DFM 2005. In the Northern Ireland context there is the additional political gesture of avoiding allusions to women in the context of sectarianism. This works to conceal women, obviate gender and ignore the many inegalitarian consequences of sectarianism. This avoidance is significantly breached on occasions when women are hailed in particular ways into conflict narratives. Then the erstwhile concealed female presence often carries powerful rhetorical authority in contemporary conflicts.

If you want to learn about women in transitioning societies, you would do well to steer clear of the mainstream academic analyses and key texts. In the vast literature generated by the Northern Irish conflict, for instance, women are either invisible or assumed to be included. There is, for example, no reference to either women or gender in McGarry and O’Leary’s standard text “Explaining Northern Ireland”  (McGarry and O’Leary 1995). Occasionally, women are mentioned in passing in an author’s effort to include them in an index. Indeed, the odd reference only serves to underscore their absence. This absence may initially seem simply a matter of common sense – men dominate in the politics, in the war and in the negotiations, so the discourse simply reflects the ‘reality’ of sex segregation in conflicts. But this uncritiqued ‘common sense’ reality is a disappearing act of ‘legitimizing discourses’ whereby women’s invisibility goes unnoticed and unremarked.(3) Along with it, also unnoticed, goes any critique of the hegemonic masculinity of the discourse.(4) The ‘disappearance’ of women in the literature of the Northern Irish conflict is a discursive mechanism whereby women’s subordination is ‘routinely accepted’ (Thomson 2006). Women are not ‘there’ in the discourse; neither are they ‘there’ in the power play where things happen. Effectively, they are kept apart from the conflict in the literature and are simply not visible in any way that reflects their presence in the population or understands their positioning in the gender regime and their role in the conflict and transition. The masculinity of key actors is also unnoticed and taken for granted. Over 95 per cent of conflict-related deaths in the North were of men and working-class areas paid the highest human costs, (see McKittrick, et al, 1999; also Hillyard, Rolston and Tomlinson 2005. CAIN, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/). In the study of the Falls Road curfew, referenced earlier, the masculinity of the main figures is unremarked and taken for granted (Campbell and Connolly 2003). Local women from outside the curfew area dramatically brought the curfew to an end. They marched with prams and children through armed military barriers to deliver food. In the article they ‘walk’ onto the page and then disappear whilst the authors compare army and police arrests. All of those arrested were men. Presumably, given the time when this occurred, all those conducting the arrests were men. The article provides a valuable critique of the militarization of civil disturbance in Northern Ireland at an early decisive stage. However, its focus on state intervention means that questions of social class, gender, masculinity and women’s agency in this decisive event are unexamined. The invisibility of women in Northern Ireland’s mainstream academic conflict discourse means that the dynamic of what went on in the private sphere of the home and its political outworking in the public sphere is also closed to critical scrutiny.

Women are not treated as actors in the conflict narrative but as bystanders to the main event – a man’s war. There are basically three observable approaches: women are invisible, or mentioned in passing, or referenced only in particular ways. The comprehensive University of Ulster’s Conflict Archive on the INternet (sic) (CAIN) is typical. Here the category ‘women’ is treated as a theme along with ‘education’ and ‘attitudes’(CAIN, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/). The investigation of how gender regimes inform and even constitute what is visible or what appears to be there for analysis in conflicts (mainly what some men do) seems like a detour away from the politics of a given event or period, into a diversion on ‘women in conflict’. Sometimes this work compounds the problem it seeks to remedy. The sole focus on women and avoidance of masculinity (and often of women’s agency in conflict) reinforces the separation of women within the mainstream literature.(5) This separation is deepened when the only women who come to prominence in the conflict narrative appear to be uncomplicated by sectarian and class tensions and discriminations, as were the women of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) (Rooney 2003).The men who dominate the narrative, on the other hand, appear to definitively embody disdained sectarian tensions as they threaten state stability. The avoidance of any critique of masculinity in this context also allows these gendered roles to escape examination and understanding.

The preoccupation of most writers on this conflict has been in the more marketable arena of ‘power politics’, with the personalities, political parties and armed groups involved. In other words, the focus is on those who, when it comes to negotiations, do the negotiating. Other preoccupations in the literature involve matters to be negotiated: arms, prisoners, policing, victims, criminal justice, and, less so, human rights and equality; added to these are the challenges of the transitional period (Campbell, Ní Aoláin and Harvey 2003). The urgency of addressing matters related to conflict, and of influencing policy and politics, as well as the legitimate aim of catching an academic market in the wake of a new ‘war on terrorism’ all seem to mitigate against the theoretical tasks of gender analyses of transitions.

The invisibility of women and the absence of gender awareness in the established literature on the Northern Irish conflict are core to understanding how women get left out of account in the context of the transition and of research informing the implementation of the equality legislation. The precarious role of women in conflict narratives discursively maintains the invisibility of gender regimes operating within transitional scenarios. This precarious role is vital in sustaining the narrative fiction that conflicts are gender-free. Indeed, the massive literature and mainstream analyses of the Northern Irish conflict is gender-free. Women’s invisibility in conflict narratives conceals how gender regimes frame what is in view. The masculinity of key actors is also invisible. Yet, gender as a key organizing principle of conflicts that structures the discursive ‘frame for understanding’, to use Judith Butler’s phrase, is nowhere examined in relation to Northern Ireland (Butler 2002, p 179).

Theory in Place

The search to see and understand how women figure in societies that are in transition from political conflicts fissured by social identities led me to intersectional theory to analyse interrelations of gender, sect and class initially in Northern Ireland. More specifically, intersectionality helps to reference how race and/or sect, class and gender work as integrated regimes of inequality within historical processes and, as such, has several benefits for thinking about the role of law and policy in conflict and transition. First, the introduction of gender into thinking about equality deconstructs the primary, binary way of thinking about equality in terms of oppositions between men. It brings women into the frame. To some extent this mirrors the US experience, where race becomes the intersectional move qualifying the dominance of gender oppositions in ‘race-free’ feminist theory. At the same time, intersectionality qualifies the dominance of race oppositions in ‘gender-free’ race theory. Intersectional theory further qualifies gender/race categories with the introduction of social class. It bring into view issues of poverty.

The thesis under construction is that gender regimes play a major role in conflicts, disadvantaging women in particular ways and the poorest women more than others. First and foremost, women are rendered invisible in conflict narratives and then left out of account in the implementation of beneficial equality provisions (Rooney 2002). Social identities, which are constituted through contested processes of state or regime formation, are not separable from gender and social class inequalities. They are integral. However, gender regimes structure identity discourses in ways that ‘preclude certain kinds of questions’ and construct certain kinds of narrative (Butler 2002, p 179). Influential in these preliminary efforts to bring gender, sect and class into view and into play in understanding Northern Ireland’s transition are a range of feminist theorists who explore hegemonic silences within different discourses that have real world impacts on women’s lives (e.g. see Parpart 1993 [development] and Conaghan 2000 [jurisprudence]; see also Knapp 2004 [sociology]). A useful tool in this exploration is feminist discourse analysis applied to how women are sometimes hailed into view in conflict discourse.

This may be decisive at key moments when the presence of ‘women’ in the narrative confers legitimacy and authority particularly to violent action taken by states on behalf of women but from which women are normatively excluded. For instance, in addition to the de facto activation of the self-defence provisions of the UN Charter, the US administration cited the defence and protection of Afghan women as justification for overthrowing the Taliban regime in October 2001. The presence of ‘women’ powerfully confers legitimacy and authority in contemporary war rhetoric. Five weeks after the invasion of Afghanistan, First Lady Laura Bush claimed, ‘The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’ (Rawi 2004). Other leading US women concurred (see Clinton 2001). Women are hailed into view but also kept apart, noticeable by their erstwhile absence from the mainstream account. The ‘women’ of these discourses are not the main actors, nor do they direct the action. They are there to be noticed, admired, and protected. In these situations their presence rhetorically advances dominant political perspectives in the narrative.

Some time after the overthrow of the Taliban regime a feminist and human rights discourse emerged in the US and from Afghanistan to challenge the rhetoric (Zalman 2003). It appears that women in Afghanistan had attempted to influence political action prior to the war. The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (Rawa) provided footage of the execution of its leader, Zarmeens, to the BBC and CNN, only to be told that the film was too shocking to broadcast. After September 11, 2001, however, this was aired repeatedly. Rawa’s photographs documenting Taliban abuses of women were reportedly used without the organization’s knowledge or permission. The photos were reproduced as flyers and dropped by US warplanes as they flew over Afghanistan (Rawi 2004). The apparent powerlessness of women is at times strategically deployed in the management conflicts to strong effect. To appear to be on the side of ‘women’ and to have women onside is occasionally an unassailable strategic position in the management of the discourse of modern conflicts. This is the case for state as well as non-state actors. It challenges the common-sense assumption, noted earlier, that women are a peripheral concern of states dealing with ‘terrorist threat’. The sometimes decisive role of women in conflicts (recall the Falls curfew cited earlier) and in the discourse (instance Afghanistan) is a powerful resource. The woman depicted, constituted and claimed by (and occasionally laying claim to) this discourse is a discursive construction with material and rhetorical effects. It is a construction of gender ‘difference’ at times deployed for quite specific political ends.⁽⁶⁾

The recognition of how gender difference operates in this context goes some way to bringing women into view. However, as Crenshaw argues, the knowledge that gender difference exists is only part of the theoretical work needed to understand what is going on:

“The struggle over which differences matter and which do not is neither an abstract nor an insignificant debate among women. Indeed, these conflicts are about more than difference as such; they raise critical issues of power” (Crenshaw 2004, p 411).

The conflicts referenced by Crenshaw are feminist disputes over theory and practice in relation to equality in the US. However, in the wider context of transitioning societies it raises critical issues of citizen–state relations, equality, discrimination and the role of law in institutional reform. Of particular interest is how gender regimes operate in societies emerging from conflict centring on the status of the state or regime itself.

The practical challenge addressed later in this article is the application of the theory-under-construction to the problem of the absence of the most marginalized women from a research-based implementation of the equality legislation in Northern Ireland’s transition. As noted above, women’s invisibility in the equality literature is reflective of their precarious role within the conflict discourse. Moreover, introducing women into an apparently gender-free arena reveals how gender is decisive in both Northern Ireland’s conflict discourse and equality agenda. These discourses are arguably constituted by an absence of women. The work of asking questions otherwise not considered involves deconstructing dominant frameworks of understanding. The theory being discussed prepares the way for this approach. Throughout, I bear in mind the challenge from feminist jurisprudence that the critical testing ground of theory is not simply internal coherence but “an ability to deliver” (Conaghan 2000, pp 364–65). Further research and debate on women’s equality in transitions is needed. Progress on the policy front that advances the intersectional equality provisions in the new legislation in Northern Ireland, for instance, would positively impact upon the lives of the most marginalized women.

My approach to gender is ‘intersectional’, although I do not confine my search for insight to a single theoretical area. I draw upon Knapp’s useful discussion and definition of gender within the frame of feminist sociology as a central, intersecting dimension of dominance and inequality that structures contemporary society (Knapp 2004). Also pivotal are Conaghan’s insights into how gender is both ‘ignored and enshrined’ in legal theory and discourse with specific real world impacts that disadvantage women in general. Conaghan’s point that the significance of gender is not “practically diminished by its relative invisibility” leads her to argue for the creation of “new knowledges which have the capacity both to liberate women … and subvert the hegemonic power of men” (Conaghan 2000, pp 360–64). This ‘new knowledge’ is to be drawn from giving voice and authority to women and using women-centred approaches as a ‘critical device’. The argument is altogether more complex than is allowed for in a brief reference, but what is useful and problematic is the assertion that giving voice to women will elucidate the problems of gender, class and sectarian inequality in transitioning societies such as Northern Ireland. Women’s accounts will generally reflect their political opinion, economic standing and relationship to the state or regime (it may work better in relation to legal discourse that, as well as being blind to gender, appears to make no distinction between women). Giving ‘voice to women’ is important but it is not sufficient for the analysis that is required to understand what is going on. In the discourse of conflicts in places such as Northern Ireland (selected) women are sometimes reified (or ‘enshrined’ to use Conaghan’s term) as victims, as peace-makers, as workers ‘across the divide’ – as specific kinds of discursively rendered symbolic presences that advance particular political understandings as well as perspectives on what it is to be a woman in this situation.

Simply mentioning women in the academic literature or even focusing on women where they are to be found in a conflict narrative – as victims or less often as prisoners or activists and so on – may reveal little about the gender regime of conflicts. Indeed, the focus upon women in the conflict, whilst ignoring intersecting social identity dimensions or adopting a ‘taken-for-granted’ attitude towards gender as synonymous with ‘women’, may compound the problem. It is not that everything is ‘gender’ nor that ‘gender is everywhere’;

“it is simply the case that nothing is ontologically protected from [gender] that nothing is necessarily or naturally or ontologically not [gender]” (Honig 1992, p 225)

which may be very like saying that gender is everywhere, but it is not.[7]

In this regard, the academic task is to develop ways to answer the question posed by Scott: “how, in what specific contexts, among which specific communities of people and by what textual and social processes has meaning been acquired”’ (Scott 2003, p 378). This article goes further and raises the questions: ‘what are the material effects of these processes for women in transitioning societies?’ and ‘what can law and policy do to offset adverse effects?’

Post-structural deconstruction of power as diffused through society, rather than located solely in the state (Parpart 1993), is both useful and problematic when addressing complex questions about states and regimes in conflicts. The mobilization of state power when the existence of the state is under attack is intensified through the state’s ability to

“control knowledge and meaning, not only through writing, but also through disciplinary and professional institutions, and in social relations.” (Parpart 1993, p 440)

The management of conflict discourse is of fundamental importance. For instance, the British state’s paradigmatic community relations approach to the discursive management of the Northern Irish conflict helped generate a welter of ‘community relations’ research that remove from the frame intersections of religious and political inequalities as well as gender. This discourse reframes the state’s responsibilities with regard to these inequalities.⁽⁸⁾ This constructs the terms within which the conflict in Northern Ireland is understood as the outcome of dysfunctional attitudes belonging to Catholics and Protestants. In this frame, sectarianism is construed as a pathological problem that the ‘two communities’ share equally.  (For pertinent reflections on the characterization of the Middle East conflict as one of neat ‘national and ethnic divisions [where] War … is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities’, see Shohatt, n.d. http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/arab_jew.html.) Structural inequalities disappear in a discourse that appears to provide recognition of ‘difference’ whilst collapsing this difference into a matter of problematic attitudes without redistributive policy implications. The pervasiveness of this approach and its discursive as well as discriminatory impacts cannot be fully examined here. McCrudden (2003, p 6) warns that

“if inequality is not tackled, sectarianism will not be tackled. Community relations activity that is not based on a notion of tackling inequality is community relations built on sand.”

The community relations approach is similar to multicultural discourse around racism in Britain and elsewhere. Potential sources of conflict appear to be handled by the state through an identity discourse that simultaneously accommodates and constructs ‘difference’ whilst doing nothing materially to change the circumstances that give rise to racism and its discriminatory consequences. In Northern Ireland this is carried through in a multiplicity of discourses which include formal social policy, community relations and equality as well as jurisprudence and state rhetoric on the use of force.⁽⁹⁾ Despite their invisibility in these discourses, women, gender and social class play key roles in all of this, locally and internationally, as well as in historical processes that predate conflicts. Much is at stake in the introduction of women and intersectional analysis into the frame.

Gender in a state

Understanding how gender and women have figured in “historical processes that, through discourse position subjects and produce their experiences”, to use Scott’s analysis again (Scott 1992, p 25), is virtually unexamined in British–Irish state-building relations. The ‘transitional moment’ arguably opens a critical space to redress this in the postcolonial theoretical literature that is currently emerging in Ireland (Carroll and King 2003). For instance, one study of the term ‘terrorist’ in a formative moment of its deployment in British–Irish relations examines the operations of gender in state mobilizations of fear and its role in state formation (Mac Suibhne and Martin 2005).  Mac Suibhne and Martin argue that the period studied (1865–68) is an ‘allegorical staging of one of the founding mythologies of the modern state. The condemnation of violence legitimates state violence and new modes of power, but presents this institutionalized violence as reactive and as designed to ensure the protection of citizens’ (Mac Suibhne and Martin 2005, p 116). With regard to modern-day state derogations from human rights conventions in ‘emergencies’ (such as the ‘war on terror’), gender plays a role in serving to legitimize derogations, as well as to legitimize discourses of state violence as reactive and designed for protection rather than aggression. The valorized and subordinate role of women (not powerful enough to be responsible for threat and most in need of protection) has been discursively deployed to justify war as a form of protection even of ‘enemy women’ (see Clinton 2001 and Rawi 2004). The emergence of postcolonial theory in Ireland contributes critical understanding of gendered forms of nation-state-citizenship formation that continues to have contemporary relevance for women’s reproductive rights and citizenship in the Republic of Ireland (Hanafin 2003). Whilst the transitional justice literature augers caution on the transformative potential of the ‘transitional moment’, this (lengthening) moment in Ireland, North and South, opens critical space for transformative reflections on times past and their relevance for the present (Campbell and Ní Aoláin 2002-03, p 876).

Insights from feminist postcolonial theory, located within cultural studies in the US, are useful here as well. This theory places gender within the frame of colonial state-building ‘divide and rule’ strategies. Valuable for reflections on transitional societies is the over time sedimentation of intersectional inequalities this entails (Shohatt 2002). Shohatt contributes to the ‘identity’ as ‘difference’ debate and argues that the ‘question of differences [is] not about some essentialist ideas about differences … but about positioning vis-à-vis the histories of power, especially since the advent of colonialism’ (Shohatt 2002, p 75). The enforced confrontation of dependent cultures and peoples with dominant discourses (even apparently progressive ones around ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’) is a rich source of critical reflection on ‘master narratives’ and their real world impacts (Afshar 1996). As already noted, women in Northern Ireland occupy an unstable and precarious position in these discourses. Northern Ireland is “not an irredeemable authoritarian state but a leading western democracy” (Campbell, Ní Aoláin and Harvey 2003, p 339). Unlike other modern liberal democratic states, however, Northern Ireland has had to come to terms “with institutional failure of a degree to which, on the state’s definition, should have been impossible” (ibid.). Northern Ireland has never achieved the collective amnesia about its coercive origins that pertains elsewhere (for instance, in most European states) or that was asserted during the conflict by the political elite in the Republic of Ireland (Deane 1991).[10] Ireland’s national narrative (North and South) continues to unravel and be remade and contested in ways that leave open both claims about historical origins and the question of what it means to be a citizen in the state. At a time when nationalist (mainly Catholic) and unionist (mainly Protestant) identities are institutionalized in the arrangements for power-sharing in local governance in Northern Ireland, the material and cultural weight of institutionalized sectarianism and its impacts upon the poorest people needs to be undermined through research based social policy. The tense political and policy problems of reform of state institutions, and the consequences for democracy and citizenship, suggest some of the complex issues involved in claims about women’s equality in transitional societies. The equality and human rights legislation deriving from the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement and the commissions set up with oversight functions arguably provide institutional mechanisms for tackling these problems and building a more just and stable society.

In order to enable us to get closer to seeing how to quantify and do something about women’s inequalities, however complex the context, Conaghan calls for a “focus on the concrete material details of women’s lived existence” (Conaghan 2000, p 369). When this is applied to women’s lives in Northern Ireland, it is productively problematic. Conaghan’s concerns are with academic feminism and the women’s movement. She suggests that a focus on material details is one way to avoid the ‘trap’ of essentialism as well as the academic trick of privileging theory that has lost hold of feminist politics. She proposes a focus on material details as the way to recuperate feminism from what she identifies as an affliction affecting academics,

“on the one hand, embracing intellectual trends which direct them away from the political concerns of the women’s movement; on the other hand, unwilling to empty feminism of its traditional political content” (Conaghan 2000, p 355).

This ‘affliction’ has emerged in very different and instructive ways in Northern Ireland where the ‘traditional political content’ of feminist politics has emerged from and had to contend with sectarianism and a state in conflict. In some areas this has led to a marriage of convenience between government-sponsored ‘community relations’ funding for women’s groups in the ‘women’s sector’ (Rooney 2002; Roulston and Davies, eds, 2000; and Cockburn 1998).(11) Not surprisingly, one outcome is that these organizations have developed strategies to secure funding by developing networks that represent Catholic and Protestant working-class women’s groups. These alliances have mutually beneficial results in the most unpropitious circumstances. That the women’s sector is sometimes show-cased to international delegations as being ‘above’ sectarian politics is essentially a political trade-off about which many women are fully cognizant (Rooney 2002). The sector relies on treating ‘women’ as though they are a group uncomplicated by sectarian inequalities, class tensions and discriminations. The urge for women’s unity in the wider Western feminist political project of ‘global sisterhood’, for instance, finds remarkable fulfilment in the ‘woman’ from Northern Ireland who occasionally comes to prominence.⁽¹²⁾ This figure, like the female figure critiqued in race-free feminist theory, is without colour and without class, or her religion, race, sect or class does not appear to matter.(13) She seems to affirm a dream of uniting women in their ‘own interests’ despite political and sectarian division (Cockburn 1998). In Northern Ireland this figure poses no threat to the state. Indeed, her prominence is arguably premised on this conservative function.⁽¹⁴⁾ The integral roles of sectarian state formation and citizenship, of masculinity and social class, are erased in the same manoeuvre. The silences about gender, sect and class are paid for by the poorest people, whose circumstances are rendered invisible to the equality agenda.⁽¹⁵⁾

The aim to advance women’s interests in the women’s sector, in Northern Ireland, has often led to a pragmatic approach that ‘enshrines’ or invents a unity of women otherwise ‘divided’ by intersections of gender, sect, and class.⁽¹⁶⁾ The extent to which political and religious inequalities matter in Northern Ireland is not addressed. The unified ‘woman’ in the sector is an outcome of ‘strategic essentialism’ that provides marginal benefits for local groups (see Conaghan 2000, pp 368–69). This is not to say that the sector should be expected to take the lead in the debate required to tackle women’s poverty. The local work of women’s education, training and personal development is important for the women concerned and undoubtedly has impacts in local working-class districts. A focus on sectarian discrimination in the sector could be divisive and detrimental to this fragile if exploitable ‘unity’. As I say, there are costs for these discursive silences and they are unequally distributed.

In the context of Northern Ireland, the separation of women as apart from the conflict and the subsuming of gender into unitary notions of ‘woman’ serve to prohibit key considerations of women’s equality from the debate required, especially in relation to tackling poverty generated over time through intersections of gender, sect and class. This separation derives from and reinforces how women are conditionally admitted to conflict narratives. The space reserved for women in mainstream discourse is one of innocence, victimhood or valorization – they are interdependent (Rooney 2002). The separation of this configured woman as apart from conflict and shocked reactions when women are violent supports the contention that gender is a powerful principle in the discursive construction of contemporary conflicts.⁽¹⁷⁾ Gender figures in militarized, masculinized, mobilizations of men, often in the defence of what is characterized as feminine – the home (‘homeland’) and the family (‘nation’) (Yuval-Davis 1997).⁽¹⁸⁾ The configuration of woman as essentially peaceful is also a powerful narrative trope in the discourse and, as has been demonstrated, in state-sponsored war rhetoric.

Transitional Conclusions

Recognizing how women are configured in conflict discourses that have practical consequences for law and policy in transitions illustrates how intersectionality can deepen understanding by reframing the analysis in terms of intersecting dimensions of inequality and discrimination. In Northern Ireland these are constitutive of state–citizen relations. The linkage between structural causes of conflict and gender relations calls for an analytic approach that explores situated and integrated regimes of gender and class and discriminations based on social identities involved in processes of state formation. It suggests a practical and theoretical approach to examining what is otherwise hidden behind highly visible, binary ‘identities’. It offers an approach that questions the specific ways that gender may be rendered visible as well as occluded in contemporary conflicts. It further offers an approach that seeks to identify specific ways that social identities are integrated into economic class relations, what the consequences are, and how these may be made visible in order to be remedied where necessary. The application of such an analysis could prove beneficial to more general understanding of transitioning societies. It provides an interpretative framework for thinking through how these intersectional relations shape experience and agency in a given political moment.

Deployed in the context of a society in transition from armed conflict, intersectionality enables us to see that the struggle of a social group for political ‘recognition’ may be simultaneously a struggle for ‘redistribution’ of economic, political and cultural state power. A core issue in this situation is that political and cultural ‘recognition’ may be formally granted and even institutionalised but economic ‘redistribution’ will be withheld. Initial signs in Northern Ireland are that this is the case.⁽¹⁹⁾ Moreover the social policy framework already exists in the case of Northern Ireland to target objective social need. Targeting Social Need policy has been in place for over ten years.⁽²⁰⁾ However, the latest social need indicators show that the poorest areas are increasing in poverty and social exclusion.

Sectarianism, or the structural working of sect in state formation, is not the same as race in the US. The construct and experience of ‘race’ cannot simply be replaced, as it were, with the construct ‘sect’. Scott’s insight into the site specific construction of social and political identities comes into play once more: “identities don’t pre-exist their strategic political invocations” (Scott 2001, p 285). The academic task carried forward in this article is to investigate the material and social implications of these strategic political invocations for transitional societies. Intersectionality theory functions as a conceptual framework or heuristic device for asking questions and describing the kinds of things to consider in this undertaking. What Hill-Collins has to say of race and state–citizen relations in the US is insightful and full of caution. She observes that this relationship created “immutable group identities” (Hill-Collins 2004, p 67). Integral to making race matter, she avers, is the related

“state distribution of social rewards to group membership [that] fosters a situation of group competition for scarce resources, [in the US] policing the boundaries of group membership becomes more important.” (Hill-Collins 2004, p 69)

Democratic participation in Northern Ireland derives from the political affiliation and historical experience that sect broadly denotes. Whilst political and religious inequalities, and relationship with the state, are most evident in the marginalized Catholic and Protestant working-class urban and rural areas, this is where ‘competition for scarce resources’ is at a premium. This is where deprivation has to be tackled on the basis of objective social need. Although women seem to be invisible in this competition for ‘scarce resources’ addressing women’s poverty in deprived neighbourhoods may be one strategic way of defusing the competition and making life better for everyone.

Finally, the liberal democratic state of Northern Ireland might be seen as a ‘moment’ of European modernity. It is a place where unresolved, postcolonial citizen–state relations and contemporary indices of social deprivation are living evidence of state-founding fault-lines of gender, sect and class under pressure. This article argues that in this context gender is constitutive of sect and class. The fault-line metaphor is useful when applied to the intersectional triad in Northern Ireland. Catholic and Protestant identities are contingent, more complex than the labels allow and they are changing, sometimes it seems with a slowness associated with geological formations. Elsewhere, nation-state-founding fault-lines, upon which stable democratic polities are based, are less visible. Arguably, from an Irish and European feminist perspective, feminist intersectionality and critical race theories have been about exposing subordinations of nation-state formation in modernity. Nationalist and race politics (and arguably that of other so-called ‘identities’) are not merely an effect of modern state formation. Arguably, “modernity itself rests on a basis of ethnic and nationalist principles” (Wimmer 2002, p 1, cited in Dodds 2003, p 251). When the work of intersectional analysis is undertaken in Northern Ireland the observation made by Knapp from a German perspective is pertinent. She reflects that the intersectional triad of race, class and gender – originating in the US context – has on its “transatlantic route to Old Europe [become a] radical historical reminder of the dark sides of modernity” (Knapp 2004, p 19). She calls for critical attention to be paid to the “uncanny and tense historical synchronicity” between the promise of universal rights and the invention of “difference and inequality along the lines of gender/class/race’ in the legitimizing politico-scientific discourses of modernity” (Knapp 2004, p 19-20). Whilst this is a challenge for another day, it suggests the critical and figurative reach of the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality.

War is not the inevitable outcome of inequalities that are linked to nation-state formation. Nor is it an inevitable outcome of exclusion from political power that is experienced in different polities by social groups designated and defined by ethnicity, race, sect or national identity (or combinations of these). Conflicts that may result from such exclusions and inequalities often seem unavoidable in retrospect but they are not. Early signs of potential conflict, for instance, in mobilizations of civil protest or in outbreaks of civil disturbance, may be handled by states in ways that address grievance, de-escalate disorder and prevent deepening conflict. Farsighted and strategic good governance that adheres to the most robust international standards of human rights may help to achieve this.

For now in Northern Ireland the progressive challenge of the transitional moment is one where law and social policy are being used to implement a longer term social transformation that empties ‘gender’, ‘sect’ and ‘class’ of discriminatory weight and significance. It is a transition to a hoped-for future in which intersectional explanations of these categories will be unnecessary and without contemporary political significance. That may be a utopian transition. So be it. Socialist and feminist imaginings have been fuelled by utopian as well as dystopian imaginings, albeit that ‘topias’, as well as transitions, need to be treated with critical caution.

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