Constructing a shared public identity in ethno nationally divided societies: comparing consociational and transformationist perspectives

ABSTRACT. In order to bolster sustainable peace building in violently divided societies, a normative suggestion is that efforts should be made to construct a shared public identity that overarches ethnic divisions. A number of different centripetal/transformationist processes are identified as engineering a shared identity in comparison to consociational arrangements, which are accused of institutionalising ethnic differences and perpetuating conflict. These transformationist approaches essentially rest on the premise that because ethnicity is constructed it can be reconstructed into new, shared forms. Looking at Northern Ireland, we argue that there are limits to the extent that ethnicity can be reconstructed into shared identities. By analysing consociational and centripetalist/transformationist approaches to division, we conclude that although consociationalism will probably not deliver a common identity, it does provide a robust form of conflict regulation.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews in this Article: Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages,. David Levine, Reproducing Families. The political economy of English population history. Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Callows: Rebel Women in Pre-war Japan. Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars. Birgit Sawyer and Anita Goransson (eds), Manliga strukturer och kvinnliga strategier. Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: women's roles in rural development in the Soviet Union. Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919–1939.     

Reimagined communities: Union veterans and the reconstruction of American nationalism

ABSTRACT. American commemoration of the Union dead and the role this played in the development of post‐war American nationalism is a topic of growing interest. Those who survived, however, are too often left out of the discussion: unsettling reminders of the sectional conflict at the time, the veterans' role in the reconstruction of American nationalism was rather more ambiguous than historians have made it seem. To trace the lineaments of American national identity after the Civil War requires some assessment of the ways in which the veteran was incorporated into or detached from the home front during the war itself and, later, from post‐war society. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to the ambiguity surrounding the veteran, the dead could, in many ways, be more easily accommodated by the new nationalist discourse emerging from the war. Positioning the veteran at the centre of the debate on war and nationalism, indeed, challenges the very concept of an imagined community emerging from or through civil conflict.