This chapter takes a particular focus on the role of the United Nations in helping people in fractured societies to work together to build a lasting peace. It identifies nine lessons: say no when we need to; know where you are going; know the context; never neglect security; manage expectations; stay on course; get the sequencing right; keep everyone on the same page; local populations should take responsibility. It argues that the most important lessons of all is that we must be listening looking out for new knowledge.

Pork soup has been used as a protest in France and Belgium against multicultural life in Europe and against the Muslim migrants who allegedly enjoyed government benefits, so much so that very little was left for needy Europeans. Some see the pork soup issue in a broader context in which Europeans challenge and defy Islam and the politically correct behaviour that has permitted the admittance of Muslim migrants into Europe. In practice, many Europeans desist from dealing with various aspects of the Jewish presence in Europe. Apparently, Muslims and Jews found common ground to protest against what they perceived as European intolerance. The ban on circumcision includes Muslims and Jews. In October 2015 the Council of Europe rejected the proposed ban on male circumcision. The restrictions directed against Muslim migrants were explained as an extension of the attempt of European 'secular theology' to 'educate' the Christians.

This chapter examines the ways in which the anarchists' varied attitudes to the national war effort largely determined their differing responses to the two Russian revolutions of 1917. The progress of pacifism and working-class anti-militarism in the run-up to the First World War went hand in hand with France's war preparations, which accelerated greatly after 1902. Anti-militarism and anti-patriotism were key anarchist themes from the movement's formal emergence in the late 1870s and remained so in the 1880s, when anarchism entered its 'heroic period'. There were many prominent anti-militarists among the French anarchists. From 1905 onwards, Peter Kropotkin had been forthright in declaring his attachment to France, which he saw as the land of the revolution. The Temps nouveaux group did not share the libertarian, spontaneist interpretation of the Russian Revolution common to the 'sovietists' and most other anarchist communists.

This chapter examines the importance of ideas and agency in the Northern Ireland peace process by focusing on the former leader of the SDLP and joint Nobel Peace Prize Winner, John Hume. Hume was one of the most important and long-standing elites in Northern Ireland conflict. He emerged first as a civil rights leader at the outset of the Troubles, was a founding member of the SDLP, and was central to the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement. Moreover, Hume played a unique dual role in his career. First, he was a political thinker, or perhaps more accurately an articulator, of a new approach to the Northern Ireland problem. Second, Hume was a key negotiator and political broker, most significantly helping to persuade militant republicans to adopt a peaceful political strategy, continually engaging with British and Irish political elites, and even guiding external actors like the US government and the EU in their respective inputs to the Northern Ireland peace process.

This chapter charts a pathway from the early days of the Troubles and the efforts to understand the mental health impact of the violence. D. O'Reilly and Des Browne reported upon the Northern Ireland Health and Social Wellbeing Survey of 1997 focusing on health service use. In 2002, P. McConnell reported upon their epidemiological study of mental health disorders and needs for treatment of the general population in the city of Derry/Londonderry. Between 2008 and 2012 a partnership of the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation and the Psychology Research Institute at Ulster University published a series of studies that examined the mental and associated physical health impact of the Troubles. The Commission for Victims and Survivors for Northern Ireland (CVSNI) was established in 2008, following the passing of legislation by the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2006.

Chapter nine explores the role of NGOs in assessing business and the private sector in promoting peace in Northern Ireland. Analyses of Northern Ireland’s peace process tend to concentrate on the public or non-profit sector. The role of the private sector has been more or less ignored. The lack of scholarly focus may reflect the traditional gap in comprehension and cooperation between business and peace. This, however, is changing. Liberal IR assumptions about the spillover effects of economic development have morphed into analysis of the potential for globalisation to improve international connections, thus making the recourse to violence less likely. At a sub-state level, the same liberal premises are present in the concept of business-based peacebuilding, which identifies a natural complementarity between the objectives of private sector actors and the maintenance of a stable, sustainable peace.

Patsy McGarry draws on the knowledge of the changed role of religion in Irish society that he has accumulated as religious affairs correspondent of The Irish Times through the troubled recent decades. He points out that until the Church hierarchy is prepared to acknowledge responsibility for their poor handling of the clerical abuse scandals and the pain inflicted on the survivors, there will be no healing. His treatment of the various scandals and the role of Irish bishops in trying to limit reputational damage to the Church, illustrate McGarry’s contention that the times are definitely ‘a changin’’ and they will continue to do so for some time to come in Ireland.

This chapter analyses the political career of the prominent American politician Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House of Representatives. It features his key contributions both in his native Massachusetts and nationally. In particular, it discusses his important role in the pursuit of a Northern Ireland at peace with itself.

This chapter shows how it is not the law, as such, but only representations of it that affect behaviour. Citizens act in terms of how they think the law is and not necessarily as it actually is. Knowledge of the law is drawn increasingly from a range of media and persons download, view and ingest this knowledge in an ad hoc and unsystematic manner. There is now an established victim’s rights discourse embedded in journalistic practice and media generated legal narratives tend to play down the rights of defendants and undermine important legal principles that safeguard the efficacy of the trial process. A diet of victim-centred news coverage over time has tended to make the general public more retributive in their thinking. The public learn about the law through the media and there is a tendency to highlight the sensational and to see the world as far more violent than is typically the case, to hold to worse police detection rates than is actually the case and to misrepresent the racial make-up of offenders. Though there is excellent coverage of crime in the media there is little consideration of legal principles and procedures and the notion that law is a technical and elaborate system of knowledge is largely absent in the portrayal of crime in both news and drama. The chapter considers the so-called CSI-effect: the notion that citizens, notably jurors, hold to absurdly high levels of proof in relation to forensic evidence and how this fetishisation of forensic evidence is having real-world affects in terms of delivering proper verdicts. This chapter critically assesses the public’s level of legal awareness in relation to crime and argue for a robust Public Criminology.

Using Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity? as its starting point, David Cochrane explores the evolving role of Catholicism in Ireland over the last half century and concludes that the disentangling of the Church from the dominant political and cultural institutions of society has paradoxically extended many of the very values Catholicism celebrates. Due to the severing of its close traditional connection to the State, the Church has rediscovered its original mission to provide a prophetic spiritual voice, especially in favour of the poor, and to align itself more closely with the concerns of its founder, Jesus Christ.

This chapter examines an aspect of myth building about law that is often overlooked, namely the role of Parliamentarians in shaping public beliefs about the European Court of Human Rights. Through an examination of recent debates in both Houses of Parliament about what became the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, the chapter illustrates how current public mistrust of the Court stems in part from ideas propagated by politicians during the course of Parliamentary debates. Specifically, the author shows the process by which two different myths about the Court have been created: first, that the Court poses a risk to the rights and freedoms of a significant group of people that national legislators, regardless of the laws that they pass, are unable to defend; second, that the Court has an inherent bias against religious groups and their adherents. The chapter demonstrates how seemingly factual legal arguments are used to strengthen and promulgate these myths. Ultimately, it shows how even at the heart of law, in the very places where law itself is made, myths about law are created and retained.