ABSTRACT
Introduction Most conflicts end with victory and defeat, rather than with a negotiated settlement. Settlements have become more common since the 1990s, but recurrence of violence remains likely.1 The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in Northern Ireland, now almost fully implemented and still framing peaceful democratic politics after 17 years, is thus at once an international exception and an international example. This chapter argues that there was indeed an international dimension to settlement, above and beyond the evident cross-border and British-Irish dimensions, but it was more important contextually than in terms of international actors and interventions. Northern Ireland is also an exception in other ways: structurally, in the fact that conflict took place within a strong (British) state; temporally, in the length and depth of conflict; even numerically, in that too few died per year for it to be included in some of the major datasets on civil war. And it is exceptional also in the agents and framing of settlement – it was the powerful British state, in conjunction with the much smaller Irish state, rather than international agencies that led the way to agreement and implemented it. Indeed the states framed not just the content but also the context of negotiations: the most important factors that paved the way to settlement (equalisation processes, state repositioning and a new Irish involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland) preceded negotiations rather than being part of them. Indeed dealing with cross-border issues and the wider British-Irish context was essential and internal to settlement. This exceptionalism means that comparative lessons from the case cannot be direct. The long Northern Ireland conflict (itself part of a long Irish and BritishIrish conflict) invites a different and more experimental focus on how particular factors and mechanisms function in different temporal, spatial and relational contexts. From such over-time comparisons we can learn not primarily what provisions lead to stability but why they do: why particular mechanisms led to settlement in 1998 (and not before); the wider geo-political context and longer temporal processes that allowed them to function in this way at this time (and not before); and the conditions of continued stability.
