This chapter discusses the political pressure on the Garda Síochána. It also describes the financial pressure on the Defence Forces, and the Anglo-Irish considerations in Irish national security policy. The most influential literature on the Garda finds that government ministers can, and do, interfere with the operational duties of the force, especially at moments of perceived political crisis. Walsh focuses on the Garda Síochána Act 1924 and Police Forces Amalgamation Act 1925 which provided the force's statutory underpinning. Ireland's overseas profile flattered a ‘bare-minimum’ policy of defence investment. Immigration control is an important area because since 9/11 Irish policy managers have emphasised the risk of terrorist cells emerging from within the State's new migrant community. Over time, Anglo-Irish cooperation on intelligence, policing, immigration and law has steadily improved. The desire to preserve the Common Travel Area helped place immigration at the core of Irish security policy.

This chapter concerns a food scandal which has been described as the food scandal to end all food scandals. It was a political scandal par excellence. The discussion examines the extraordinarily corrosive impact on public opinion and trust in government that allegations about secrecy in the management of safety in general and food safety in particular can have. The charge made against public authorities in Britain and abroad, as more and more information came into the public domain, was that they had put the interests of a minority of the population, its food producers and exporters, before the interests of the population as a whole. The chapter considers the extent to which the traumatic public announcement, made in 1996, that BSE was almost certainly the cause of vCJD, conditioned changes in the behaviour of government risk managers and communicators and the experts from whom they are expected to take advice.

This chapter considers theoretical approaches to the study of networks, including conceptions of networking as a political practice. It briefly considers claims that have been made about networks and the emergence of global civil society. It discusses global justice networks (GJNs), and their key characteristics of diversity, creativity, convergence, scale politics, and the creation of spaces of participatory democracy and solidarity. It argues that they do not ‘act’ as a coherent actor in the manner of social movements, although some GJNs may come together, in particular times and places, in order to prosecute specific campaigns or global days of action.

This chapter summarises the roles played by former prisoners in conflict transformation and assesses the extent to which they can assist in the desectarianisation of Northern Ireland. Former prisoners have made significant political contributions to the development and maintenance of peace. Without forfeiting all of the views that contributed to their incarceration, republicans have been obliged to work with the state; loyalists have been required to accept republicans within state structures and explore means of working with the historic ‘enemy’ across the communal divide. Memories of conflict will fade; the local ‘stature’ of republican and loyalist former prisoners may reduce and funding for conflict transformation may diminish. The role and future of the former prisoner community is set against the enduring realities of criminalisation and discrimination. The role played by that community in upholding and delivering peace has been instrumental in the relegation of violence to a mere bit player in the politics of Northern Ireland.

This chapter examines the domestic polity of Ireland and the mediating forces to Europeanisation. It outlines the key elements of Irish political and social culture and analyses the way in which these factors have moderated the Europeanisation process. The analysis reveals that the effects of Europeanisation have been filtered by Ireland's complex history, distinctive political culture, social norms, nationalistic penchants and strongly centralised political-administrative structure as well as its geographical and population size.

This concluding chapter summarises information on the wars in Kosovo and Chechnya and how these helped shape and improve accounts of global politics. It presents a brief discussion of the First and Second World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. From there it reviews the lessons discussed in the previous wars. This chapter ends with an explanation of the main goal of the book, which is to improve further conversations about the study of war.

This chapter considers People's Global Action (Asia), a recently established, non-hierarchical global network of diverse Asian grassroots social movements and activists, committed to decentralisation and political initiatives outside the realm of formal state politics. Its main function is to oppose the destructive consequences of neoliberal policies and to develop concrete alternatives.

This chapter summarises the key themes and findings of the book and evaluates current theoretical and empirical debates about global civil society, participative democracy, and transnational solidarity within global justice networks (GJNs). It argues that issues of space and scale are critical to the sustainability and future strategy of GJNs. Tensions arise between developing more horizontalist networks that facilitate democracy and grassroots participation, and the need to develop structures that can relay a global consciousness down to local activists. This chapter argues that understanding the potential for GJNs to develop a sustainable politics of international solidarity involves not just understanding the way that the ‘local’ is enmeshed in wider spatial relations, but also, and perhaps more critically, assessing how the ‘global’ is invoked in struggles that take place nationally and locally.

This book examines the extent to which the peace process in Northern Ireland developed as a result of the repudiation or maintenance of previously held views by those who had ‘fought the war’ and spent time in prison as a consequence of their actions. Most contemporary accounts of the peace and political processes were concentrated at elite level, examining the ability of political representatives to construct and maintain an inclusive set of compromises. The book argues that none of these compromises were sustainable without backing from ‘combatants’ in the conflict. As such, any account of the peace process which failed to take account of why so many former prisoners supported the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was incomplete. It also explores why conflict ended amid ideological continuity not change, with emphasis on loyalism and republicanism. Moreover, the book highlights the importance of prisoner releases in peace processes beyond Northern Ireland, and how the literature on demilitarisation, demobilisation, and reintegration has tended to overlook the centrality of prisoner releases to a successful peace process.

Long after the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the far-reaching consequences envisaged in the consociation of the competing political groupings of Ulster unionism and Irish nationalism became manifest. A long and tortuous path led to the formation of an inclusive coalition government headed by the supposed political extremes of the Democratic Unionist Party, representing the Unionist-British position, and Sinn Fein (SF), part of the wider Irish republican movement. Among the extensive range of interviews conducted, there was a near complete rejection that the peace process and demilitarisation was either a rejection of violence as being terrorist-inspired and that previous military activity lacked ideological reason or that the discursive value of loyalism or republicanism had been abandoned. Republican consciousness, as it pertained to demilitarisation and demobilisation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), has been closely allied to the fortunes of SF, although not all former IRA prisoners are supportive of that particular political party.