Identity, the politics of policing, and limits to legitimacy in Northern Ireland

This paper draws connections between the lived experiences of community-based stakeholders in the Northern Ireland peace process and dominant discourses and practices of political leaders to identify (de)legitimation processes and the concomitant reproduction of ethnopolitical identities. Findings reveal ontological planes animated by narratives about the so-called political policing of public disorder and disputes over the past which align the identities of otherwise quite different and conflicted intra-ethnic constituencies. Policing processes which become disputed, due to their historically central role in constituting and reflecting the contested logic of the state provide events or social and organizational 'fields' in which opportunistic actors can effectively reconstruct ethnopolitical boundaries, in ways which provide both rational (for political and organizational leaders) outcomes, and, inexplicable phenomenological or cultural ends of 'groupness'. The implications of such processes on intercommunal and internecine conflict are discussed.