ABSTRACT
There has been some effort in post-conflict Northern Ireland and BosniaHerzegovina to recognise ethnicities other than those specified in the peace agreements, but there seems to be a stubborn resistance, considerably more pronounced in the former than the latter, to concede anything on the assumption that indigenes must belong to one or other of the identity categories specified in the respective peace agreements. But how so? It’s not because these identities are primordial. Consociationalists have become leery of primordialism. As we have seen McGarry and O’Leary assert that there is a major difference between recognising that ethnic identities are durable and suggesting that they are primordial (2004: 32). But what is the difference? If identities are not primordial, how are they maintained, reproduced and passed on?
