ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the origins of the peace process. In addition to highlighting how the peace process led the British and Irish governments to pursue divergent strategies prior to 1997, it also shows that part of the United States' role in the early days of the peace and political processes was to strengthen the Irish government's hand against the British government when the former's interests diverged from the latter. The chapter outlines how the dynamics created by the British, Irish and United States governments' interactions engendered the exogenous pressures that facilitated the Belfast Agreement. Moreover, It also shows how the British and Irish governments' almost overwhelming interest in the stability of the Adams and McGuinness leadership of the republican movement, along with their divergent relationships to unionist and nationalist political parties in Northern Ireland, led both to fudge the issue of decommissioning, an issue outside of the Agreement's consociational architecture that would prove highly destabilising in the post-Agreement period.
