Ethnic Elites and Rituals of Provocation: Politicians, Pastors, and Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland

Jonathan S. Blake

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2019, vol. 31, issue 4, 817-835

Abstract: Prominent theories of ethnic conflict argue that instrumental ethnic elites incite violence in order to promote their own power. Yet this approach focuses primarily on political leaders and ignores other ethnic elites, meaning that we know little about how other influential actors think about provocation. In this paper, I present novel data from Northern Ireland on diverse elite attitudes toward polarising Protestant parades with a long history of sparking ethnic violence. Using original surveys of Protestant elected officials and clergy as well as interviews with ex-paramilitaries, this paper demonstrates that these elite groups have different, often competing, interests and opinions regarding contested parades: while politicians tend to support provocative parades, the others do not. By addressing elite actors that are often ignored, I present a more nuanced picture of elite-mass relations and ethnic mobilisation in conflict.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2017.1289090 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:31:y:2019:i:4:p:817-835

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2017.1289090

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().