This book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the conflict in Northern Ireland, providing a rigorous analysis of its dynamics and present structure and proposing a new approach to its resolution. It deals with historical process, communal relations, ideology, politics, economics and culture and with the wider British, Irish and international contexts. It reveals at once the enormous complexity of the conflict and shows how it is generated by a particular system of relationships which can be precisely and clearly described. The book proposes an emancipatory approach to the resolution of the conflict, conceived as the dismantling of this system of relationships. Although radical, this approach is already implicit in the converging understandings of the British and Irish governments of the causes of conflict. The authors argue that only much more determined pursuit of an emancipatory approach will allow an agreed political settlement to emerge.

‘One of the most impressive works on the Northern Ireland conflict which I have read in many years. It has the magisterial quality of J. J. Lee’s Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society, or John Whyte’s Interpreting Northern Ireland. It is an amazingly comprehensive and coherent manuscript, which draws on many disciplines - history, economics, politics and anthropology - to provide a rich and complex synthesis.’

Paul Arthur - University of Ulster, Jordanstown

‘This is an incisive yet fair-minded study. Drawing scrupulously on a very wide range of sources, the authors survey the arguments and come up with their own interesting suggestions. One of the best recent treatments of the Ulster problem.’

Paul Bew - Queen’s University, Belfast

‘In seeking to explain the Northern Ireland conflict, the authors have taken on an exceptionally ambitious task. They have carried it out with considerable skill and ability.’

Source: Irish Independent

‘They reap a rich harvest of insight and argument from the formidably large corpus of research now available; but they tie these together by a set of strong conceptual cords - power, dominance, equality.’

W. Harvey Cox Source: Irish Political Studies