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12 - Protestantism and Settler Identity

The Ambiguous Case of Northern Ireland

from Part VII - Northern Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2021

Nadim N. Rouhana
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Massachusetts
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

This chapter addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the post-1922 period. In the Republic, Irish Protestants accommodated to the new state and majority Catholic government; in Northern Ireland, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people” took on the forms of a settler-colonial state. Protestant supremacy expressed itself in triumphalist cultural forms and in legalized and informal discrimination against Catholics. Northern Ireland offers a “laboratory” for the formations of the settler colony that clarifies the tendencies of settler-colonial entities: the necessary supremacism or racism, the sectarianization of working-class allegiances, the disproportionately violent response of the state to the demand for rights, and the necessity for the withdrawal of “mother country” support for a peace process to begin. Northern Ireland highlights how settler mentalities are the effect of a structure of dominance, not an unchangeable given. Analogies with Palestine/Israel are frequently invoked and the Northern Irish peace process might suggest a just way to end Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Northern Ireland indicates that the entrenched structures of racial or ethnic supremacy in settler-colonial societies are not necessarily permanent or endemic, but capable of transformation if relations of domination are dismantled.

Type
Chapter
Information
When Politics are Sacralized
Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism
, pp. 309 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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