This week we ask how the tradition of parading in Northern Ireland affects relations between its historically divided communities.
Parading — when members of the unionist community march to commemorate historical events such as the 1690 Battle of the Boyne — is one of the most visible expressions of Northern Ireland's deep social divisions. But does it actually inflame tensions between communities?
A new study examines parading as a "contentious ritual", using survey data, interviews, and participant observation to find out. The results offer fresh insight into identity, conflict, and inter-group relations in a divided society.
Joining host Alan Renwick are three of the article's authors: Kristin Bakke, Kit Rickard, and Giovanni Hollenweger.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we are looking at parades in Northern Ireland. How do they affect relations between different groups in this historically divided society?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Northern Ireland society has long been deeply divided between unionists, who are predominantly Protestant and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and nationalists, most of whom are Catholic and who want Northern Ireland to leave the UK and be part of a united Ireland.
This division goes back centuries. It led in the last third of the 20th century to a period of sustained intergroup violence in which several thousand people lost their lives. It affects many aspects of Northern Ireland society and one of its manifestations is a tradition of so-called parading when members, particularly of parts of the unionist community march with banners, drums and flutes to commemorate a range of historical events, most notably the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over forces loyal to the deposed Catholic King James II in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Well a new article explores the practice of parading in Northern Ireland as an example of what it calls contentious ritual, and it asks what impact parading has on intergroup relations. Is it true, as often claimed, that parading stokes hostility between Northern Ireland's communities?
That article is written by a wonderful UCL team. Kristin Bakke is Professor of Political Science and International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science, and also a longstanding friend of the podcast, and the other authors are all our former PhD students. Kit Rickard completed his PhD in 2022 and is now a senior researcher at the Centre for Security Studies at ETH Zürich. Sigrid Weber gained her PhD in 2023 and is now assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at IE University in Madrid. And Giovanni Hollenweger successfully defended his PhD thesis just this week, as we're recording, and is now moving on to be assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen. And three of those authors, Kristin, Kit and Giovanni, join me now. So welcome to you all. Great to have you here.
Many congratulations in particular to Giovanni on completing and successfully securing your PhD. That's a
[00:02:51] Giovanni Hollenweger: Thank you.
[00:02:51] Alan Renwick: Fantastic achievement. So let's begin with you, in fact, Giovanni. And just to set the scene a little bit about the nature of these parades. If we were in Northern Ireland and we were watching one of these parades, what would we see?
[00:03:04] Giovanni Hollenweger: So I think that most people when thinking about parades in Northern Ireland, they would be thinking usually about the 12th of July. That is the most important period of parading in Northern Ireland. Not to say that there are many other parades that happen throughout the year, aside from the 12th of July, but definitely in that period, it is the most grandeous form of parading. It is mostly loyalist or unionist parading.
[00:03:29] Alan Renwick: And this is the one that's specifically commemorating the Battle of Boyne.
[00:03:32] Giovanni Hollenweger: Exactly.
[00:03:32] Alan Renwick: That I mentioned in, in 1690.
[00:03:34] Giovanni Hollenweger: Exactly. So you will see a lot of flags with King Billy. You'll see a lot of marching bands, some of them dressed in paramilitary-like uniforms, a lot of songs and a lot of police presence as well. But they are grandeous rituals. And there are a lot of people, especially in the centre of Belfast, where I was conducting my participant observation. It is a very big event and, uh, very joyful, especially for the people who are participating, contentious for some of the people that see this potentially as a sign of domination or provocation of one group over another.
But aside from these big events, there are also other smaller parades, for example, the church parades that happen in certain circumscribed areas of Belfast, but also other cities. And these tend to be much smaller and much more sombre or solemn in their nature. And they're called church parades because usually they begin or they end or they begin and end with a service, a mass for the participants.
Aside from Protestant parades, there are also Republican or Catholic parades as well.
[00:04:43] Alan Renwick: Ha, I was gonna ask you this actually, yeah.
[00:04:44] Giovanni Hollenweger: Yeah.
[00:04:45] Alan Renwick: So it's not just a phenomenon on the unionist Protestant side.
[00:04:48] Giovanni Hollenweger: No. It is a phenomenon that happens throughout all like the groups in Northern Ireland, but of course it is more prevalent or the, these events are much bigger for the unionists side, I would say.
[00:05:00] Alan Renwick: So we often hear people talking about the Protestant marching season, which I guess is particularly around the 12th of July.
[00:05:06] Giovanni Hollenweger: Correct. Yeah.
[00:05:06] Alan Renwick: But that's not all that we're talking about. There's much more going on in Northern Ireland throughout the year.
[00:05:10] Giovanni Hollenweger: No, for and for example, another important one for the Protestant side would be the 1st of July, which commemorates the Battle of the Somme.
[00:05:17] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:17] Giovanni Hollenweger: And this is also a little bit different from the July 12th, which tends to be a more joyful and carnival esque type of event. Whereas the July 1st is much more sombre because it commemorates all the lives lost in the Battle of the Somme.
[00:05:33] Alan Renwick: And Kit, could we say anything more about the history of the marching? We talked there a little bit about the origins and the Battle of the Boyne and so on, but what's the history of the actual marching itself?
[00:05:43] Kit Rickard: Yeah. It's interesting because I guess marching and parading was something that a lot of societies across Europe did in the 19th century, right? Some of the biggest crowd events that you would see on the island of Ireland included parades and pilgrimages, right? Or sporting events. And these have, I would say, kind of fallen out of fashion in most places in Europe, but they remained important in the north of Ireland. That's partly, I mean, there are books written on this, it's not exactly what our research is on, and so I'm just giving my perspective here. But I think it's partly because, of course, of the contentious divisions in Northern Ireland, yeah. But also because of the organisations that exist that are involved in parading themselves.
So when Giovanni described parades and I think he did that excellently, a big organisation is the Orange Order. And the Orange Order is a fraternity loosely based on the Masonic Lodge that is for Protestant membership. And they are involved in organising a lot of the marches and the parades. Whilst parades sometimes start at a church, they also often start at a lodge, an Orange Lodge. And so I think that's part of the story as well of why they continue today is because the institutions continue to exist and it is a way of them celebrating their culture, which matters a lot in this divided society.
[00:07:03] Alan Renwick: And Kit, we're recording this in a week when there has been a lot of action, shocking action on the streets of parts of Northern Ireland of a very different nature. So in terms of riots, in response to an attempted murder that took place in Belfast, and I guess we should just be clear, what we're talking about here is clearly a very, very different kind of thing.
Though I guess, you know, you were talking there about a tradition of contentious politics in Northern Ireland, which we'll be getting onto. So potentially there are some links between these different activities as well.
[00:07:34] Kit Rickard: There are links and I wouldn't overstate the links, you know. I think what's happened in the past week, if I could just say a few words, what I think has happened in the past week is, um, some parts of it are unique to the Northern Irish context, and some of them are not unique to the Northern Irish context as we know.
Because, if you are familiar with British politics generally at the moment, and some of the anti-immigration movements and protests that we've seen across the island, across the United Kingdom, but also in the Republic of Ireland, there are certain things that are common in this kind of what we've seen happen in the past week in Northern Ireland.
And some things are pretty unique. So there are legacies of the conflict that mean that there are certain ways that these communities deal with issues, right? One of them is a kind of, um, I guess you'd call it a culture for over-rioting. People see rioting as a kind of a form of expressing discontent.
But you also have a kind of nostalgia of the war that doesn't exist in places like Southport or Southampton, right? So young people, generally male, they, although a lot of people suffered during the conflict, a lot of people also, or some people, got esteem, got a purpose. And there's some nostalgia in Northern Ireland around this.
And, also, I mean, this is interesting because, you know, I am Irish from the Republic of Ireland, I am also Catholic, but there's a lot of trauma on the island around images of people being displaced and burnt out of their home. Because that's how the conflict started in the 1960s, right? And it was Catholics that were targeted in that way. And so when that happens, when that form of violence happens, it kind of triggers both sides, right? Catholics are also feeling very traumatised by the events that have occurred in the past week, because it is a stark reminder of what happened, you know, 60-70 years ago.
And then, there are certain legacies that are interesting. I mean, one of the kind of peculiarities of the violence is that the initial attempt at murder, the knife attack, which was incredibly brutal, happened in a predominantly Catholic neighbourhood. But the violence that we see is happening in predominantly Protestant neighbourhoods. And it's kind of, if you've been to Belfast, you know that these neighbourhoods are very segregated, right?
So it seems quite puzzling, but I think that is also in a way, partly, not only, but partly a legacy of the conflict in the sense that Irish Catholics who identify as Irish in Northern Ireland have this kind of affinity to immigrants because they're coming from war-torn countries where they kind of see a link to their own histories. So that might explain some of the patterns of violence that we've seen.
But generally, I'd say what you see in Northern Ireland actually is what you see everywhere in Dublin, in Manchester, in Southampton, in London. It's just the way the community responds probably is a function of the legacies of the conflict.
[00:10:19] Alan Renwick: Very interesting. Thank you for that Kit. And I should just say that we're recording this about a week ahead of when the episode will go out so clearly further developments may take place during that period. Kristin, let's turn to you. We've been talking about contentious politics, contentious ritual.
[00:10:36] Kristin Bakke: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:36] Alan Renwick: When referring to these parades. What do these words mean?
[00:10:40] Kristin Bakke: Yeah, so the, I mean, the contentious nature of these large scale public events is that, you know, they're very visible and they're celebratory for parts of the community, but they might be seen, as Giovanni was pointing out, as threatening to other parts of the community.
And of course the parades that we think of the most, the July 12th parades, the unionist parades, often they might be rooted through or near Catholic areas. So this is part of what makes them contentious.
In terms of, you know, the strict definition of what is a contentious ritual, we draw on Jonathan Blake, who has also written about parading in Northern Ireland, and he defines contentious rituals as socially standardised repeated actions that are considered contested because of the political claims they are seen to make.
[00:11:32] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:32] Kristin Bakke: So it's not that these are political events or parades per se, they're cultural, they're, you know, celebratory of a community or a culture, but they are seen to be political or seen to be making political claims, particularly by the outgroup in the community.
[00:11:48] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:49] Kristin Bakke: And, you know, Giovanni was describing what these look like and the contentious nature of it. And for listeners who might not follow news in Northern Ireland, they might have seen the show that is not on Netflix, Derry Girls, about Northern Ireland. And there is an episode there where one of the families, a Catholic family, is basically fleeing Derry on July the 12th because they don't want to be there when these parades are happening because it's seen as you know, a provocation and it's seen as, you know, unpleasant to be there. And that show is, you know, it's a funny show, but it's, you know, there's a serious undertone.
[00:12:25] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Very much recommend Derry Girls to anyone who hasn't seen it. And presumably the sorts of thing that we see in Northern Ireland are not unique to Northern Ireland. Presumably we can point to examples of contentious ritual taking place in other places as well.
[00:12:41] Kristin Bakke: Yeah we can, and contentual rituals comes in different forms
[00:12:45] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:45] Kristin Bakke: In forms of parading where we can think of, you know, flags and monuments and other things. But when we think of these rituals in terms of parades specifically, we can think of Hindu processions in India, well actually both, I guess Hindu and Muslim events in India.
The flag march in Jerusalem where you have Israeli nationalists and parts of the march then is going through the Muslim or Palestinian quarters of Jerusalem. So these are not unique to Northern Ireland. We see them in other parts of the world.
[00:13:15] Alan Renwick: Yeah. What question then are you asking in relation to these rituals in your research?
[00:13:22] Kristin Bakke: So the big outcome questions we're interested in is, how do intergroup divisions and post-conflict and divided societies persist? So, in particular, in post-conflict societies, divisions between communities that have been at war or in conflict with one another. So that's the big that, you know, on the outcome side.
And, you know, the definition of divided societies are societies that are deeply divided along, very often ethnic, religious, but you know, political lines. So we're, you know, we're interested in the persistence of these divisions. And then particularly we're interested in do contentious rituals, you know, contribute to perpetuating these divisions.
[00:14:01] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm. So Giovanni, shall I turn to you to ask what we already know about that kind of question? So I guess there's quite a lot of literature that's already been done, research already been done exploring the impact of these kinds of contentious ritual. What do we already know and what sorts of hypotheses does that lead you to?
[00:14:18] Giovanni Hollenweger: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. To answer these questions, we are actually drawing onto already existing literatures that are related to each other.
So the first one is on social identity theory and intergroup relations. So we know through existing research that existing identity lines can be hard and exacerbated by conflict. And these divisions will have some kind of sticky legacies. Their stickiness will take place through different mechanisms.
We could think of three of them. So intergenerational transmission in your own family, you know, from father to son, to grandson, et cetera. But then we could also think of it as a transmission through socialisation processes within your own community. So this idea that, you know, this is our community, and then there's an outgroup, and this is something that can be transmitted through the members of the ingroup, right? And then we would have transmissions through political institutions. Then we can think of cases where you have power sharing agreements that some people will argue can crystallise already existing divisions and cleavages.
Then we also engage with the literature on symbols and political symbols in particular. Now a lot of this literature looks at top down symbols. So those that come from some kind of political or cultural authority such as, you know, anthems, national anthems, national flags and so forth. But then there are also bottom up symbols and practices, which are those that we are mostly focusing on in this research, and that those are, again, parades, religious rituals and practices, songs, et cetera.
So then our way to look at this and understand these questions is how do these types of bottom up practices and rituals and contentious rituals in particular affect the stickiness and the negative attitudes between two groups?
So basically when you mentioned hypotheses, so we have two main mechanisms that drive our arguments. So the first one is in-group pride. So for the in-group, that is the group that is participating in the ritual, right? So in our case, we would be talking about the unionist group or the Protestant group. Then for them, they would of course feel pride. You know, they're commemorating something that to them is very salient about their culture and their identity.
Now, this in of itself is not something that could necessarily lead to negative attitudes between groups, but it could become such if it, for example, activates a collective memory of the ingroup dominating or having a victory over the outgroup. So that's where this might come in play in terms of pride, ingroup pride creating some kind of negative intergroup attitudes.
[00:17:04] Alan Renwick: So that's thinking particularly about negative attitudes of the ingroup. So within the unionist community, towards the outgroup, towards the
[00:17:12] Giovanni Hollenweger: Exactly.
[00:17:13] Alan Renwick: The Catholic community.
[00:17:14] Giovanni Hollenweger: Exactly. Exactly. And then for the outgroup, there would be a mechanism of provocation. So the outgroup would be seeing these contentious rituals, like Kristin mentioned, as threatening, potentially, right? Because again, they commemorate a victory of the ingroup over the outgroup and features of it, such as, you know, going through areas that are predominantly, you know, inhabited by the outgroup.
All these things could be seen as threatening as a way for the ingroup to signal their domination or the provocation over the outgroup. And so this provocation, of course, would also negatively impact the relations between the groups. And these are the mechanisms that we hypothesise would link these kinds of contentious rituals to worsening intergroup relations.
[00:18:02] Alan Renwick: Hmm. Great. Thank you. That's really clear. And I guess I was thinking about the comparison between these kinds of parades and a gay pride march, for example. And so there clearly a gay pride march, a lot of it is about building ingroup pride, and that's a really important thing. But there's no sense, or typically at least there's no sense of that leading on to a sense of animosity towards the outgroup, towards the heterosexual community because there isn't that kind of contentious backdrop, I guess, in that case. So yeah, so we have different things happening depending on the contentiousness, exactly what Kristin was talking about of these rituals.
Okay. So that's really clear in terms of the hypotheses. Then of course, as always, when we are talking about empirical research, we want to have some lovely methodology in order to test these hypotheses rigorously. Kit, I think I'm going to you on this. So, Kit, how do you test these hypotheses in relation to the parades in Northern Ireland?
[00:18:59] Kit Rickard: The hypothesis is really quite a simple one, right? It's like if you experience parades, you'll have negative intergroup attitudes, and we expect that to be the same across the groups. The mechanisms are different, right? Whilst it's an easy hypothesis to say, it's actually a very difficult hypothesis to test.
And so what we do is we triangulate three designs. We conduct a kind of pooled survey analysis with unique data on parades to establish these kind of broad spatial and temporal trends, how exposure over time and space has affected intergroup attitudes.
Second, to get at the causal link, which is of course, you know, we should use that word very loosely in this context. But to get closer to the short term effects, if you like, we exploit a kind of quasi experimental design in a survey that we filled in 2022. That survey was designed and implemented with colleagues at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo and funded by the Research Council of Norway.
And then to get at the mechanisms, which are different in the groups, we conduct field work in 2023, and that was made possible by British Academy small grant.
So we combined these to test this relatively simple hypothesis. A big part of this is collecting data on parades, which is interesting because I'm also gonna refer to a pride parade in a couple of minutes, which brings us back to whether or not they're contentious.
So we created the Irish Contentious Parades dataset, which is based on web scraping the Parades Commission website. The commission, the Parades Commission, is an independent body that was set up to place restrictions on parades that they deemed to be contentious. That is parades that they consider to have the potential to raise concerns and community tensions. So in that capacity, it can impose restrictions on timing, on the music that's played, or whether there's music played, on the symbols that are on display, for instance, no paramilitary symbols are allowed, generally, although you will see them sometimes, and the form of participation that's allowed at these parades.
The main aim of the commission is always to allow to parade to occur, right? That's important because we live in a liberal democracy where people should be allowed to celebrate their identity and express themselves and their political views. So part of this is that their website lists all the parades because the communities that may be affected by a parade, they have a right to know whether there will be a parade, where it's going to occur, when will it occur, how many people will be present. And so that they have the opportunity to object to the parade. Again, because it's a liberal democracy. So therefore, the website includes a lot of information on every single parade, including route descriptions, which we use to geolocate about 93% of these parades.
[00:21:34] Alan Renwick: And we're talking here about thousands of parades. I mean, the, number here I was really amazed by.
[00:21:39] Kit Rickard: Yeah, it's quite amazing. It's 53,000 parades since they started the records, the Parade Commission. So 2001, I think, or 2000, and it's 53,000 parades. Now, most of those are Protestant parades, which we identify with the kind of the organisation groups that are doing these parades. For example, tomorrow there are 37 parades happening in Northern Ireland.
Now, it's important here to say, the Parade Commission's actually in charge of parades and political processions, yeah? Or processions more generally, I would say. So tomorrow is Omagh Pride Day, yeah? So Omagh Pride is part of this dataset, right? We remove it in our analysis, but it's important to say that the 53,000 actually also includes all sorts of parades that are not linked to what we're specifically interested in.
Each year there are between a hundred and three hundred parades which are considered contentious. Now, Omagh Pride is one of those, yeah. All pride events in Northern Ireland are considered contentious, or I should use the word that the Parades Commission use, which is sensitive, because people have the right to object and people do object to pride events, predominantly religious organisations.
But you'll also see individuals entering objection and fielding protests. And so they enter the dataset that way. We actually remove them, but it's important to say, because you were speaking about pride. The dynamic, we wouldn't expect it to be the same, but in this context, it is considered a sensitive parade.
And so just a couple of notes on where these parades occur, you know, the problem with a podcast is I can't show you, but they tend to occur in Protestant areas as you would expect. And like I said, there's about a hundred to three hundred per annum that are considered sensitive by the Parades Commission.
So how do we use this parades data? We combine it with British Election Study surveys, which are conducted during general elections in the UK. And here the main independent variable of our analysis is exposure and number of contentious parades that occur in a person's district in the year of an election. And we use two dependent variables, very common measures of intergroup attitudes. One is around marriage, and the other one is around schooling. Would you mind a close relative marrying across religious lines? Would you send your child to a mixed religious school?
And the bottom line here is that we find a negative correlation between the number of contentious parades and respondent intergroup attitudes, right? So that's some support for the hypothesis. Of course, this analysis is observational. It's prone to a lot of methodological issues, not least of which I will state is endogeneity. So do contentious parades occur because there are negative attitudes? But that's the classic. And so to account for this, we exploit a survey that we fielded in 2022 during the marching season from May to September. And because
[00:24:27] Alan Renwick: And this is the, the quasi experimental bit?
[00:24:29] Kit Rickard: This is the quasi experimental bit, yeah.
And so because the date on which people were interviewed is not related to the peak of the parading season, which is the 12th of July, we can compare the views of people before and after to identify what effect, using that word loosely again, the peak of the season has on their intergroup attitudes.
[00:24:49] Alan Renwick: And this is a survey that you were fielding over a period of several months, if I remember,
[00:24:53] Kit Rickard: Yes
[00:24:54] Alan Renwick: But it was the several months that went over the 12th of July.
[00:24:57] Kit Rickard: That's correct.
[00:24:58] Alan Renwick: So you can look at before and at after.
[00:24:59] Kit Rickard: Yeah.
And we're also, this is important to state, the surveys fielded in areas that we would say are deprived in Belfast and other urban areas. These are the kind of areas where you tend to have contentious parades, yeah. Again, our dependent variables, so our measure of intergroup attitudes here is the extent to which people would live in a mixed or a segregated community.
And what we find is that there's basically a negative effect. After the 12th, you find that those views are more negative than they were before. And we find that this is more persistent amongst Catholic respondents than Protestant ones.
So we conclude from this that contentious rituals repeatedly impact intergroup attitudes every year. These parades happen every year, uh, which helps us understand the negative association that we find in the kind of broader observational study. And crucially, it points to a kind of causal link, not just being that negative attitudes cause parades, but that parades lead to negative attitudes.
[00:25:56] Alan Renwick: Yeah, so there you're positing that there's no plausible alternative explanation for why there would be this change from before the 12th of July to after the 12th of July. So it's not like the weather hots up and people get more kind of angsty or something like that, but it's,
[00:26:13] Kit Rickard: That's a great comment because ultimately that's why I'm using this word quasi experimental very loosely. We cannot rule out that people, generally, over the summer, because of the heat, for instance, or because of something around August that is unrelated to the 12th causes negative attitudes, right? And that's why this is really not a cleanly identified effect, and that's why we triangulate it with other approaches. There are lots of alternative explanations for this, but that is also why we do the field work, to identify the mechanisms within the groups.
[00:26:47] Alan Renwick: Fantastic. On which we turned to Giovanni who was in Belfast, as you mentioned earlier, and actually observed these parades and talked with people taking part in the parades. So do you want to tell us a bit about what the kind of process of that research was?
[00:27:01] Giovanni Hollenweger: Yes. So there were a few components as to the field work.
So one component, like you said, was the participant observation. So I tried to follow different parades. Of course, the main point of this was to follow the parades on the 12th and the particularly contentious go on on the 12th. But I was also trying to follow other parades in different days before the 12th and after. One of them was a church parade that I just mentioned that was very different in nature to the bigger ones on the 12th. And I also tried to follow also what we could consider as a Republican or nationalist adjacent parades, just to see what the difference was with that as well.
Another important component was interviews. So I conducted interviews with people from both communities and these people are generally involved either from a Protestant community, they would be involved in the parades in some capacity. For example, they could be members of the Orange Order, right? And from the other community, of course, those would be people that were around at the time and I was asking them directly about what they felt about the parades happening and happening near the areas where they live in Belfast.
And then finally the third component was informal chats. So I tried to immerse myself in the environment that was there at the time, talking to taxi drivers, going to pubs in the Catholic dominant areas as well as in the Protestant dominant areas and talking to people that I would find there such as Orange Order members that were having a pint, you know, just to get a sense of what was in their mind during this like very topical period for parading.
[00:28:45] Alan Renwick: And were people happy to talk to you and be kind of open and frank about their thoughts?
[00:28:50] Giovanni Hollenweger: Most of the time, yes. Actually, in fact, they were very happy to have someone, an outsider, they would probably see me as an outsider, that was interested in what was happening from both sides. Of course, the Catholics that I would talk to and interview, most of them, and they were uneasy about the parades happening, but they were happy to talk about their feelings surrounding them.
And the Protestants that I would interview or talk to, most of them, they were quite happy about the parading season and are very interested in explaining to me the history and why that it is important for them to do this. And also explaining what is their view of the political contentiousness surrounding them.
[00:29:30] Alan Renwick: Hmm.
[00:29:30] Giovanni Hollenweger: So, yeah, they were very, very interested actually in talking about it.
[00:29:33] Alan Renwick: Hmm. Great. And what did you find through that process?
[00:29:38] Giovanni Hollenweger: So, through our field work, we find that indeed the respondents did see the rituals as a provocation, from the Catholic side particularly. They thought, you know, that the rituals were helping the Protestant narrative of a culture under attack. They were trying to show that they are still a dominant group. They saw them as a supremacist form of rituals. And even gave them some sense of having a need to defend their own communities if these parades were, you know, passing through Catholic predominant areas or close to them.
And on the Protestant side, we saw evidence of the pride mechanism as well. So some of this was quite benign and nice, like, you know, being proud of having your family and your friends seeing you parade through the city with your sash if you're part of the Orange Order and singing the songs, et cetera. But yeah, it was a way for them to celebrate their identity as opposed to Irish or Catholic identity as well.
[00:30:42] Alan Renwick: So that sense of opposition and the otherness of the other community was part of that pride feeling?
[00:30:48] Giovanni Hollenweger: Yes, yes, absolutely, yes. And then we did find something that we didn't necessarily expect from our theory, but that was quite interesting. We actually found evidence of the provocation mechanism for the Protestant side as well. So many of the Protestant interviewees and people I talked to generally were saying that they felt the Catholic side was provoking them as well through their contestation of the parades.
They thought that the Catholics were trying to suppress their freedom to do these parades. And they were trying to get a reaction from them to show that the Protestant side was violent. So we noticed that this could be indicative of a potential escalation dynamic going on between the groups.
[00:31:36] Alan Renwick: Hmm. Yeah, I found that third element really intriguing, that you saw that provocation aspect going kind of in both directions because of how people were responding to the parade. Great, thank you. So Kristin, putting all of these elements together, Kit and Giovanni there have described the different parts of the research. What overall do you think we learned?
[00:31:57] Kristin Bakke: Well, I mean, first let me just go back to what Kit said maybe earlier that, you know, the hypothesis that guides or the expectation is perhaps fairly simple, but it's difficult to test it. And we try to do it in many, many different ways and collecting lots of new data. And my co-authors on this paper have been doing the heavy lifting on collecting this data and doing this analysis. And so I think it's a nice example of, you know, trying to figure out what might look like a simple relationship, which isn't so simple to test, but using different sources of data, different tools, you know, to try to get at it.
And I think overall, it paints a picture that, you know, suggests that these are rituals, you know, they are contentious, they do have negative intergroup effects. And we find some evidence that, you know, the mechanisms that are driving this have to do with, you know, both this pride and the provocation mechanism. And as Giovanni points out, some dynamics we hadn't quite thought of to begin with.
In terms of overall conclusions, as Kit said there, there is a potential endogenous relationship here in the sense that these rituals might occur because these are divided societies.
[00:33:02] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:33:03] Kristin Bakke: But these rituals also actively reproduce and deepen the divisions.
[00:33:08] Alan Renwick: Yes.
[00:33:08] Kristin Bakke: In societies, in divided societies. And there's also a tension here between, you know, fostering and enabling communities to celebrate their community, what's distinct about their culture and, you know, historical events that are important to them. There's a tension between that and then the need to foster reconciliation, right?
So these rituals can, you know, their community rituals and they're celebrating a community, but they show that there's a potential darker side to that. And I think that's a very difficult policy challenge. Like, how do you navigate that and like how do you achieve that balance between, you know, enabling a community to celebrate their community, but then that potentially has negative knock on effects.
[00:33:51] Alan Renwick: And again, I guess I'm just thinking about the Gay Pride march analogy again and about whether it is possible to change the dynamic such that it is a celebration of a particular community and not a denigration of another community, or not an attempt to express supremacy over that other community. But I guess given the history
[00:34:14] Kristin Bakke: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:14] Alan Renwick: And the centuries of history, it's just incredibly difficult to try to shift that dynamic.
[00:34:19] Kristin Bakke: Yeah. And particularly these memories, like many, are on national collective memories. You know, if it's anchored in historical events that are about battles and fighting and who won over who, I mean, I think it's harder to get away from the, this is about domination dynamic.
[00:34:34] Kit Rickard: I like the, the comment and the conversation. There is an analogy here with murals in Belfast which emerged during a conflict and are often very violent in the image that they're showing, like paramilitary actors, they're protecting you or they're coercive actors in these neighbourhoods coercing you, so threatening people who live there not to go to the police or whatever it might be. And recent efforts to try and create murals that have no link to this, right?
To say, okay, you have a culture of murals. Let's make them not about paramilitary actors, let's not make them about violence. Let's make them about safe schools, let's make them anti knife crime, these kind of things. And I do think that specifically when it comes to parades that commemorate a military victory, it's going to be very hard to remove the contention there, yeah.
[00:35:23] Alan Renwick: Interesting. Giovanni?
[00:35:24] Giovanni Hollenweger: Yes. I also wanted to add that one of the things I got from some of my interviews with Catholic participants is that they were not necessarily against the parades themselves, but most of the time they were upset about the fact that they would travel through Catholic dominant areas or nearby areas because they saw this as a deliberate attempt to instil some kind of fear or provoke the residents, right?
Then when I was talking to Protestant participants and I was asking them about this, why do you pass through these areas? The general answer would be, this is tradition. These areas used to be Protestant dominant. We've passed through these areas since time immemorial and we are not willing to change this just because now the demographic makeup has changed.
They would even say some of the Orange Order temples or halls, they exist now in areas that are Catholic dominant, where there used to be, of course, in area that were Protestant dominant. So, this is, I think, also an interesting factor and one that will make it difficult to get away from the contentiousness of the parades because both of the groups have their reasons has to the location and how these parades take place.
[00:36:47] Alan Renwick: And Kristin, finally, to you, we've been, uh, reflecting there a little bit upon implications within Northern Ireland. Are there also kind of wider implications for our understanding of contentious politics, contentious ritual more broadly?
[00:37:01] Kristin Bakke: Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, we think these phenomena or these contentious rituals and marches are not happening only in Northern Ireland. And you know, the research is in dialogue with research on marches that are happening elsewhere, such as Hindu processions in India.
The difficulty of doing this kind of work in a comparative way, particularly in what you're talking about, you know, micro level evidence on people's attitudes and behaviours, is that it is a very resource intensive kind of exercise. So it's harder to do it in a comparative context. But, you know, there is a large body of work on memory politics, on, you know, how memories are used and commemorated on, you know, murals and monuments and symbols, that, you know, speak to how celebrations of communities might have different kinds of effects both sort of positive but also more negative effects for intergroup relations.
[00:37:54] Alan Renwick: Kit?
[00:37:54] Kit Rickard: Yeah, I'd just like to add that, you know, in a way it is about Northern Ireland and we have a tendency to want to explain whether or not it explains other cases or how we can learn from this context. And I would say that maybe Northern Ireland is quite unique, right? And then we should think, okay, what is so unique about Northern Ireland? Why is it unique?
And I think one of the questions that we've had to shelve during this project is why are there so many parades in Northern Ireland, right? And I've kind of hinted at why I think there are, but I think this is an area of potential future research, right? Which is to think, well, in a way, everyone is allowed to parade because it's a democracy and there is no cohesive narrative about the past at the state level. The state cannot take a very strong role and impose a top-down narrative around the past because of the way the conflict ended ultimately. That would be my opinion, you know? And so once we take that, then the question is not so much, you know, do these rituals have negative effects beyond Northern Ireland? But it's more thinking about why are these rituals so important in Northern Ireland and not as important in other contexts.
And I think that's maybe
[00:39:05] Alan Renwick: So I mean I think you are suggesting. Are you suggesting there that essentially because the conflict ended in a compromise between the two sides in which there was a refusal to give any sort of victory to one side or the other, that means that in actual fact contention keeps going and there's no end to it?
[00:39:23] Kit Rickard: I think that because of the way the conflict ended, the state cannot take a very strong view on the past, and it cannot educate and create memorial practices around the past that would create this kind of cohesive narrative. Now, there's actually an interesting comparison with Ukraine, right? Ukraine from 1990 to 2014 did not have a national historical programme because it was just too contentious to try and create a common story of the Ukrainian nation that would not anger people in eastern Ukraine, satisfy people in the West and not anger Russia. And so it didn't, and you see this very low level bottom up memory practices in the names of streets in the statues that appear, you can map these in Ukraine. It's incredible though, very spatially cohesive, yes.
And then of course, when Russia basically annexed Crimea, you have this complete shift in Ukraine where they realise, okay, now we need a cohesive narrative. And I think that is part of the story here, that actually Northern Ireland cannot take this narrative. And so, memory politics is really a bottom up and a very communal activity. You see this in the museums. You also see this in the educational policies of the north.
[00:40:39] Alan Renwick: We're getting into really fascinating territory here. We've gone over time. So thank you all so much for talking about this paper. Thank you to Kit, to Kristin and to Giovanni.
We have been discussing the article Contentious Rituals and Intergroup Relations: Parading in Northern Ireland, written by Kit Rickard, Giovanni Hollenweger, Sigrid Weber and Kristin M. Bakke, and recently published in the British Journal of Political Science. As ever, we will put the details in the show notes for this episode.
We'll be back next week for our final episode before the summer break when we'll be talking with Professor Meg Russell. Meg recently stepped down after more than a decade as director of the UCL Constitution Unit, so we'll be looking across her career to date as a leading expert on the UK Parliament. And in the week of the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum, we'll be considering the momentous changes in the UK constitutional politics that have taken place over recent years.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Matthieu Dinh. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.