Social Science Research Council

The GSC Conference convened in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the first week of September 2001. This meeting, a pivotal event each year in the program, brings together the GSC Committee and staff with the newly selected Fellows and Grantees in a week of seminars, workshops, and interactions with local scholars and policy makers. It is the major, face-to-face opportunity within the program to build relationships, skills, and collaborative networks. The conference builds upon the successful model pioneered by other SSRC programs, notably the Program on International Security & Cooperation.

Belfast was chosen to host the conference for a number of reasons, not least its ongoing relevance as a venue of sectarian conflict and peace building. Over the quarter century of the “Troubles,” the U.K. province has been the site not only of violence and division, but of a vibrant civil society, inventive efforts to address the concerns of all parties, substantive intervention of the international community, and an immense research literature in history and social science on the many dimensions of the crisis. During the week we were there, this relevance was plainly visible: outbreaks of violence occurred daily in North Belfast as the school year began and Catholic parents taking their children to school met hostile resistance from Protestant neighbors. The government of David Trimble, a moderate unionist, had resigned just weeks before in protest of the IRA’s refusal to disarm, and Sein Fein, the IRA’s political ally, countercharged that disarmament would proceed only if other promises of the landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement, notably a change in policing and the presence of British army troops, were addressed. The situation involved, as it had for decades, several themes the GSC regularly engages—the relationship of human rights to security, the role of the U.S., E.U., and other major powers, the extent of sovereignty and special status for minorities, small arms proliferation, economic growth and civil unrest, and the politics of Britain and effects on British foreign policy, among others. It was all there for us to experience and debate.

We were able to delve into this fascinating laboratory of conflict and peacemaking by hearing from several scholars and political leaders in Northern Ireland: Neil Jarman of the Community Development Centre provided a brilliant political tour of the city; Paul Arthur of the University of Ulster, author of Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Problem (Belfast: Black Staff Press, 2000), was our consigliere and gave insightful introductions to our political speakers; Mari Fitzduff and her colleagues at INCORE demonstrated how they organize research at their innovative peace research institute in Derry; Deputy Minister Dermot Nesbitt, filling in for David Trimble, spoke to us at Stormont Castle about the evolution of the peace process; David Hume, Nobel Laureate for Peace with David Trimble for his longstanding devotion to a non-violence solution to the conflict, addressed the group on our final evening; and three on-the-ground activists brought the role of civil society into sharp relief at a plenary organized by the Fellows. By the end of the week, we had enjoyed a multidimensional, in-depth review of this signal predicament of international security.

The conference was organized to maximize the interaction between Fellows and Grantees on the one hand, and Committee members on the other. The sixteen Fellows, whose tenure runs between one to two years, benefited from one-on-one sessions with the Committee, as well as one-hour seminars at which they and seven Grantees presented their research design to a small audience of their peers, the Committee, and staff. Plenaries focused on topics of research collaboration (keynoted by SSRC president Craig Calhoun) and audiences for research. Skills workshops on action research and research methods were led by Committee members. There were additional sessions on outreach, publication, and research problems. The meetings were held at Queen’s University Belfast and the Wellington Park Hotel.

The conference was clearly successful in achieving its two primary objectives: advising on research design and outreach, and building professional relationships. Since much of the research funded will be devoted to conflict analysis and its larger implications for IR theory and practice, Northern Ireland was a nearly perfect venue for comparative and networking purposes. The Committee is an exceptional resource of accomplished senior scholars and practitioners, and they provided perspectives that the young scholars, many of whom have little experience outside their homelands, found uniquely valuable. The Fellows will return for their second conference in September 2003. Grantees will present their research findings in Budapest in May 2002. Research results will be one of the features of GSC publications, meetings, and public events in the coming months and years.

Click here to view a listing of GSC Fellows