L’histoire coloniale en Irlande, le développement de l’Etat-nation et les divisions ethnoreligieuses se conjuguent pour faciliter les conflits et limiter les perspectives de transformation sociale. Depuis le Brexit, la vie politique en Irlande du Nord revient à ses clivages traditionnels : l’unionisme se focalise à nouveau sur la souveraineté de l’Etat britannique tandis que le nationalisme met l’accent sur l’unité irlandaise.

Les transformations sociales restent toutefois possibles, notamment dans les régions frontalières, au sein de groupes intercommunautaires ou encore dans les endroits dont la démographie évolue. Cette communication s’intéresse à ces espaces où de nouvelles stratégies identitaires collectives sont mises en œuvre, même si leur capacité à peser sur le système politique reste limitée.

Jennifer Todd is Emeritus (Full) Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, UCD; Research Director, Institute for British-Irish Studies, UCD (previously Director); a Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy, UCD and associate Fellow at the Centre on Constitutional Change U Edinburgh. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, ‘considered the highest academic honour in Ireland’ since 2007. She gained her degrees in philosophy from University of Kent at Canterbury (BA) and Boston University (PhD). The focus of her work, from early analyses of aesthetics and politics to current work on conflict and settlement, state change and identity shift, has been on the interrelation of socio-economic and political processes and processes of cultural change. She has extensive publications, individually and jointly, on ethnicity, identity, conflict and Northern Ireland: including her 1996 Cambridge UP Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland (with J. Ruane) and two recent books, Identity Change after Conflict: Ethnicity, Boundaries and Belonging in the Two Irelands (Springer Palgrave Dec 2018) and (with J. Coakley) Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland 1969-2019 (Oxford University Press, Jan 2020) and (as contributing co-editor with D. Walsh) Unionisms in Times of Change: Brexit Britain and the Balkans (Routledge 2021, July).With J. Ruane, she is writing a sequel to Dynamics of Conflict.