is in place, and a governing executive branch consists of ministers selected according to their parties’ numbers in the assembly—the d’Hondt method. The settlement dictates that local assembly members must designate themselves as either “unionist,” “nationalist,” or “other” upon entrance. “Key decisions” must be ratified on a “cross-community” basis—with either a majority of nationalists and of unionists voting in favor or a “weighted” majority with 60 percent overall approval and 40 percent of these designations (see Agreement Reached 1998: 5–6). Key decisions are identified by either the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) or by petition from a “significant minority.”
This model is nothing new. Since civil conflict led to direct British rule and the suspension of the post-partition parliament in 1972, consociationalism has been offered as a solution for Northern Ireland. In 1973–74, unionist protests brought down a short-lived experiment in power-sharing; that experiment came out of the Sunningdale Agreement and is the origin of the SDLP’s Séamus Mallon’s dig at both unionists and republicans when he called the GFA “Sunningdale for slow learners.”28
However, an innovation of the GFA is that it also makes human rights central to the broader consociational framework, with the entirety of section 6 devoted to “Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity.” It mandates the creation of a national human rights institution (NHRI), following a recent international practice that balances oversight of state policy with recognizing the extralegal dimension of human rights promotion. The result was the HRC, established to advise the state on legislation and a bill of rights, promote broader public awareness of human rights values, and pursue investigations and legal challenges regarding human rights breaches. The predecessor of the HRC, the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights in Northern Ireland, existed since 1973, but local activists had deplored it as impotent during its twenty-five-year history. Gay rights activists, who clashed with the committee in the 1970s regarding sodomy legislation, jokingly called it “saccharine,” comparing its superficial authority to artificial sweeteners.
During and after the peace process, the convergence of consociational institutions and continuing divisions within the society embedded human rights discourse into local political conflicts. This outcome must be understood in the broader history of peace and human rights, in practice and in scholarship. Similarities, overlapping objectives, and conflicts between the two endeavors are apparent. For example, both peace and human rights are often traced conceptually to Enlightenment thought (see Howard 2000; Hunt 2008). A recent trend in scholarship on war—organized collective conflict—emphasizes its decline over the course of human existence (e.g., Goldstein 2011; Pinker 2011; Mueller 2004), and this work locates causality for contemporary peace, of sorts, in the growth of modern, democratic states and Enlightenment humanism. Similarly, one strand of historical scholarship on human rights traces an arc of progress (e.g., Hunt 2007; Ishay 2008; Lauren 2011). These analyses of peace and human rights share a broad progressive orientation to history, particularly regarding the Enlightenment and modernity. Yet claims such as Pinker’s (2011) that modern states have progressively led to peace are open to critique; for example, one may reasonably ask how, and for whom, high rates of incarceration in the United States constitute peace. In this vein, valorizing histories of human rights, such as Hunt (2007), have also received sharp critique (e.g., Moyn 2007, 2010).
Nevertheless, since World War II there has been widespread recognition that violent conflict produces violations and denials of human rights. Commonsensically, the resolution of conflict entails recognition of human rights to prevent the recurrence of conflict and to create legitimacy for postconflict institutions. Yet the truism that these practices are interdependent is challenging in practice. Many scholars locate the difficulty of reconciling conflict resolution practice and human rights principles in a clash between the pragmatic (conflict resolution) and idealist (human rights) impulses of the fields (e.g., Helsing and Mertus 2006). Nevertheless, argues Bell (2000), their continuing linkage in theory and actual peace agreements reflects a broader association of justice—regarding representation, state institutions, and past violence—with peace, despite contradictions between conflict resolution’s realpolitik and human rights ideals. Much of the work linking conflict resolution and human rights emphasizes a mutually reinforcing reciprocity or “synergy” between the two areas of practice (e.g., Galant and Parlevliet 2005). Said and Lerche (2006) go farther, arguing that peace itself should be recognized as a universal human right.
The practical challenges of protecting such a right are immense, however, as Donnelly (2006) argues. Other scholars share his reserved perspective on human rights principles and conflict resolution. In fact, human rights advocacy has been shown to be counterproductive for reconciliation in some postconflict societies. For example, in South Africa, human rights discourse has been linked to the substitution of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) for retributive justice (see Wilson 2001). In another case, demands for human rights and disagreements about how to define and secure them have caused returns to violence in Sri Lanka (see Keenan 2006, 2007).
Nevertheless, human rights advocacy and conflict resolution practice share overlapping concerns. These come from a conscious or unconscious concern with a term Said and Lerche (2006) use, “robust peace”—that is, peace beyond the absence of violence. A minimal or negative formulation of peace exists when violence or war is neither present nor imminent. In contrast, “robust peace,” writes geographer Peter Taylor (1991), exists when “the fundamental social structures of the social system negate violence” (80; see also Elias and Turpin 1994). Institutions and processes that allow the pursuit of disagreements through politics, rather than war, are important characteristics of such structures. A robust peace, then, is not the absence of conflict but the presence of legitimate institutions that facilitate nonviolent political debates and negotiation. This institutional element is where consociationalism becomes a tool for conflict resolution. Similarly, human rights advocates are concerned that postconflict law and institutions are both legitimate and just. National human rights institutions are a relatively recent attempt to augment the judicial protection of human rights. As the Northern Ireland HRC’s aims make clear, NHRIs also move beyond the realm of state and law to the more nebulous and contested terrain of society and culture (Smith 2006).
There are also correspondences in theory and practice regarding social spheres. Conflict resolution theory and practice recognize the incompleteness of institutional settlements, acknowledging the roles of nonstate and nonparty actors, including grassroots groups, in promoting broader social changes and reconciliation. These are often conceptualized as “track two” diplomacy, which complements official, “track one” efforts (e.g., Gidron et al. 2002). Curle (1990) devised a model to capture this dimension, calling it “conflict transformation.” Lederach (1995a, b, 1997, 2005) became the leading theorist and proponent of the concept, arguing that “resolution” is not “sufficiently concerned with the deeper structural, cultural, and long-term relational aspects of conflict” (1995a: 201).29 Much of conflict resolution literature emphasizes modeling in terms of temporal phases of conflict; conflict transformation is intended to capture the longer-term, open-ended processes of social change necessary to end violent conflicts. As such, it acknowledges that settlements are not endings, and that elite-focused negotiations do not neatly determine broader social changes that negate violence.
Correspondingly, human rights discourse, as discussed earlier, includes a range of activities that are positioned in a sphere of politics beyond the state. In particular, advocacy and mobilization have been treated as a way to embed political norms, beyond law, which promote human rights—mirroring the claim that conflict transformation creates values that promote peace beyond institutions. For example, Stammers (2003, 2009) argues that social movements were a primary force in shaping current understandings of human rights. Much of this work emphasizes the transnational circulation of human rights and its translation into local cultural consciousness and norms (e.g., Merry 2006b; Goodale 2009b; Risse et al. 1999; Mertus 1999).
These overlapping themes are echoed in the GFA. Conflict transformation entered the lexicon of my Northern Irish research participants in the 1990s, much as human rights had in previous decades. In some ways, the GFA engages with a transformative approach, recognizing that the basic political conflict regarding sovereignty cannot be resolved. The tenets of conflict