This is the first comprehensive study of direct rule as the system of governance which operated in Northern Ireland for most of the period between 1972 and 2007. The major institutions of governance are described and examined in detail, including the often neglected sectors of the role of the Westminster parliament, the civil service, local government, quangos, ombudsmen offices, cross-border structures and the public expenditure process. The book explains how the complex system covering transferred, reserved and excepted functions worked and provided viable governance despite political violence, constitutional conflict and political party disagreements. In addition, a comparison is drawn between direct rule and devolution, analysing both the positive and negative impact of direct rule, as well as identifying where there has been minimal divergence in processes and outcomes. It will prove an invaluable reference source on direct rule and provide a comparative basis for assessing devolution for students of public administration, government, politics, public policy and devolution.

Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.

In a field riven by controversy, the Oxford Companion to Irish History is a comprehensive and balanced source of information on the history of this complex and fascinating country. Written by a team of almost 100 experts, the Companion's 1,800 A-Z entries explore Irish history from earliest times to the beginning of the 21st century.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant examines what it means to be a public servant in today’s world(s) where globalisation and neoliberalism have proliferated the number of actors who contribute to the public purpose sector and created new spaces that public servants now operate in. It considers how different scholarly approaches can contribute to a better understanding of the identities, motivations, values, roles, skills, positions and futures for the public servant, and how scholarly knowledge can be informed by and translated into value for practice. The book combines academic contributions with those from practitioners so that key lessons may be synthesised and translated into the context of the public servant.

Since the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. This text explores the pivotal moments in this history.

In April 1998, the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the bloodshed that had engulfed Northern Ireland for thirty years. It was lauded worldwide as an example of an iconic peace process to which other divided societies should aspire. Today, the region has avoided returning to the bloodshed of the Troubles, but the peace that exists is deeply troubled and far from stable. The botched Parliament at Stormont lumbers from crisis to crisis and society remains deeply divided. At the time of writing, Sinn Féin and the DUP are refusing to share power and Northern Ireland faces direct rule from London. Meanwhile, Brexit poses a serious threat to the country's hard-won stability. Twenty years on from the historic accord, journalist Siobhán Fenton revisits the Good Friday Agreement, exploring its successes and failures, assessing the extent to which Northern Ireland has been able to move on from the Troubles, and analysing the recent collapse of power-sharing at Stormont. This remarkable book re-evaluates the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement and asks what needs to change to create a healthy and functional politics in Northern Ireland.

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

Examines recent evidence of a growing symmetry in the operation of devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This book makes one of the first systematic and detailed comparisons of the operation of the devolved institutions and machinery of governance. It uses a comparative approach to explore the key workings of government.

This book examines the governance arrangements in Northern Ireland through a multi-level lens, particularly in the period since the new institutions established through the 1998 Agreement became more firmly embedded.

Urban Peacebuilding in Divided Societies explores the effects of urban policy and planning in the management of ethnic conflict in strife-torn societies, focusing on the cases of Belfast and Johannesburg. It combines perspectives from urban geography, political science, social psychology, and urban planning to study the relationship between ethnic ideologies and the urban strategies that affect ethnic territoriality in the form of urban land use, housing, economic development, services, and citizen involvement. The book contrasts Belfast, embedded within an uncertain shift from conflict to political settlement, with Johannesburg, engaged in post-resolution reconciliation, to analyze, along different points of societal transition, the contributions of urban policymaking to peacemaking and peacebuilding. It describes the differing rolesobstructive or facilitativethat contested cities can play amidst broader peacemaking efforts, consistent with Bollens contention that there are lessons in urban peacebuilding for constructing mutually tolerable living environments at the regional and national levels. Effectively, cities (and urban policies) are the locus for operationalizing national ideologies of ethnic coexistence. } Urban Peacebuilding in Divided Societies explores the effects of urban policy and planning in the management of ethnic conflict in strife-torn societies, focusing on the cases of Belfast and Johannesburg. It combines perspectives from urban geography, political science, social psychology, and urban planning to study the relationship between ethnic ideologies and the urban strategies that affect ethnic territoriality in the form of urban land use, housing, economic development, services, and citizen involvement. The book contrasts Belfast, embedded within an uncertain shift from conflict to political settlement, with Johannesburg, engaged in post-resolution reconciliation, to analyze, along different points of societal transition, the contributions of urban policymaking to peacemaking and peacebuilding. It describes the differing rolesobstructive or facilitativethat contested cities can play amidst broader peacemaking efforts, consistent with Bollens contention that there are lessons in urban peacebuilding for constructing mutually tolerable living environments at the regional and national levels. Effectively, cities (and urban policies) are the locus for operationalizing national ideologies of ethnic coexistence.}