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This book explores everyday identity change and its role in transforming ethnic, national and religious divisions. It uses very extensive interviews in post-conflict Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the early 21st century to compare the extent and the micro-level cultural logics of identity change. It widens comparisons to the Gard in France, and uses multiple methods to reconstruct the impact of identity innovation on social and political outcomes in the 2010s. It shows the irreducible causal importance of identity change for wider compromise after conflict. It speaks to those interested in Cultural Sociology, Politics, Conflict and Peace Studies, Nationalism, Religion, International Relations and European and Irish Studies.--

AbstractEveryday identity change is common after conflict, as people attempt to move away from oppositional group relations and closed group boundaries. This article asks how it scales up and out to impact these group relations and boundaries, and what stops this? Theoretically, the article focusses on complex oppositional configurations of groupness, where relationality and feedback mechanisms (rather than more easily measured variables) are crucial to change and continuity, and in which moral authority is a key node of reproduction. It uses the normatively weighted concept of transformation to augment existing research on boundary and identity change, while elaborating it to recognise the role of everyday agency in furthering change and moral inertia in impeding it. Substantively, the article compares the processes of everyday transformation of groupness in three cases that are very similar in historical depth, social embeddedness, symbolic opposition and everyday change, but very different in time-scale and with contrasting outcomes: successful transformation of reformation religious groupness; partial transformation of national groupness; and failed transformation of complexly-configured ethnic groupness in Northern Ireland. This allows tracing of the patterns and mechanisms at work. To anticipate, the article argues that everyday identity change can erode the moral authority of groupness. Its impact is generational and dependent on institutional linkages. The article highlights the importance of moral mechanisms as drivers of and obstacles to change; and it suggests ways that the obstacles could be overcome by radical policy interventions.

Northern Ireland is a case that lets us explore how people respond when deep‐set horizontal inequality is substantively reduced. This article focusses on the reform of horizontal inequality in the cultural sphere and argues that it is likely to be contentious because units and measures are directly related to conflicting constructs of group identity, meaning, and value, and intertwined with conflict over state legitimacy. Northern Ireland shows when and how this becomes politically problematic. The article traces an uneven but largely successful process of economic and political reform, followed by a reversal in the second decade of the 21st century, when unionist unease with cultural equality was reframed into political opposition which at times threatened the stability of the settlement itself. The backlash came when it did because of a confluence of processes: a particularly inappropriate presentation of cultural equality, at a time when the momentum of the peace process was coming to an end, and other opportunities, in particular for the Protestant working class, were closing. The case suggests the need to develop a conception of cultural (in)equality that is attuned to the asymmetric and contested constructions of "groupness" well before backlash occurs.

This article focusses on social, symbolic and territorial boundaries in Northern Ireland, and the group relationships that they define. It asks how the social and symbolic boundaries have been renewed despite so much political and popular effort to move beyond them since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Theoretically, the question is a foundational one: how group boundaries go beyond individual intent. Frank Wright addressed this question nearly forty years ago, showing the role of violence as a mechanism that worked behind the backs of those who wanted change. Northern Ireland, he argued, is the sort of 'ethnic frontier' where there is no way out, short of revolutionary force which overthrows one group and thereby creates new borders and new scapegoats. I will argue that this conclusion pays too little attention to the socio-cultural mechanisms that reproduce group division as a quasi-institutional inertial phenomenon that is also open to everyday change. I argue that quite radical transformation of group division is possible and also difficult, and that liberal consociational institutions are much less important in promoting or hindering such change than is often supposed. This revises Wright's argument and it suggests a way forward – radical interventionism – that is neither violent upheaval, impossible reconciliation, or stabilised constraint. In conclusion, I ask if and how change in the territorial boundaries would help or hinder this.

This article reviews some recent trends in research on everyday identity change. It argues that this field of research makes an important contribution to the explanation of political change and social transformation. It is particularly relevant to research on participation, social movements and contentious politics: like the latter, it emphasizes relationality, temporality and context, not simply variables and generalization; like the latter, it focusses on agency, choice and social practice as well as structure, power and constraint. Its focus on moving out from exclusivist, closed and oppositional forms of group identity is of particular interest. The article outlines some of the challenges and achievements of this field of research and highlights four areas where significant work exists and where it may usefully be developed further. In particular it focusses on: boundary work, and the informal nudging of boundaries towards greater permeability; identity-work, and the challenge of comparison; (once)-dominated and (once-)dominant groups, and their distinctive forms of identity change; and the interrelation of everyday, institutional and political processes. It argues for the need to incorporate analysis of everyday change in multi-levelled explanations of socio-political outcomes.

The rise of identity politics has magnified the interest in and importance of identity in contemporary politics. Yet identity politics disguises intense contest and change behind its strong and simple identity claims. The concept of identity change is key to its analysis, giving analytic leverage into the identity-coalitions mobilized by elites, and the different reasons they are successful. This article argues for a new broad research agenda on identity change. The agenda builds on recent works on ethnic identity and boundary change while broadening the methodology and scope of analysis beyond changing identity categories to changing identity content and meaning, and emphasizing the intersecting processes of contestation and consensus, continuity and change. This mainstreams analysis of identity change in the wider political science analysis of social and political change.