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Guest post by Sabine Carey, Marcela Ibáñez, and Eline Drury Løvlien
On April 10, 1998, various political parties in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland signed a peace deal ending decades of violent conflict. Twenty-five years later, the Good Friday Agreement remains an example of complex but successful peace negotiations that ended the conflict era known as The Troubles.
Since the agreement, Northern Ireland has experienced a sharp decline in violence. But sectarian divisions continue as a constant feature in everyday life. Peace walls remain in many cities, separating predominantly Catholic nationalists from predominantly Protestant unionist and loyalist neighborhoods. Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol increased tensions between the previously warring communities, leading to an upsurge in sectarian violence, which has been a great cause of concern.
In March 2022, we conducted an online survey to understand attitudes toward sectarianism among Northern Ireland’s adult population. Our results show that sectarianism continues to impact perceptions and attitudes in Northern Ireland. The continued presence of paramilitaries is still a divisive issue that follows not just sectarian lines but also has a strong gender component.
Our findings show that the pattern of who identifies as Unionist or Nationalist closely resembles the patterns of who reports having a Protestant or Catholic background. Unionists prefer a closer political union with Great Britain and are predominantly Protestant, Nationalists are overwhelmingly Catholic and are in favor of joining the Republic of Ireland.
Catholic and Nationalist identities appear to have a greater salience for the post-agreement generations than for older generations who lived through the Troubles. For Protestant and Unionist respondents, the opposite is the case, as religious background and community affiliation have a higher salience among older groups, particularly among men. Among the adults we surveyed, for men the modal age of those identifying as Unionists is 58 years, for women it is 46.
When asked about the greatest problem facing Northern Ireland today, sectarianism still features strongly among both communities. Today, the fault lines of the conflict seem to resonate more with those from a Catholic background than with those from a Protestant background. While Protestants were predominantly concerned with poverty and crime, among Catholics sectarianism emerged most often as the greatest concern. Just over 50 percent of Catholic respondents mentioned an aspect relating to the Troubles (sectarianism or paramilitaries) as the greatest problem today, compared to only 39 percent of Protestant respondents. Most Protestant respondents selected Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol as the greatest problem, reflecting concerns of the Protestant community discussed in a Political Violence At A Glance post from 2021.
To what extent does economic status drive concerns? Those who see themselves as belonging to a lower-income group were more likely to identify poverty and unemployment as the greatest problem. Concerns about sectarianism and (former) paramilitary groups appeared most prevalent among those who placed themselves in the high-income group.
The continued presence of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries is a noticeable feature in post-conflict Northern Ireland. While they are predominantly associated with violence and crime, some view them as a source of security and stability. While our findings show that concerns about paramilitaries were more prevalent among high-income earners, the perception of paramilitaries has a significant gender component. Nearly 50 percent of male Catholic respondents attributed a controlling influence to paramilitaries in their area. And while most of them saw these groups as a source of fear and intimidation, 32 percent agreed that the paramilitaries kept their local area safe. But only 5 percent of female Catholic respondents felt similarly. This difference is not as stark between female and male Protestant respondents. Both groups were substantially less likely than male Catholics to consider paramilitary groups as a source of safety.
Different perceptions of armed groups by gender are not unique to Northern Ireland. A 2014 study on Colombia found significant differences between female and male perceptions of post-conflict politics and participation. Although there were no substantial gender differences in the overall support for the peace process in Colombia, female respondents reported higher levels of distrust and skepticism toward demobilization, forgiveness, and reconciliation and higher disapproval of the political participation of former FARC members. The effect was even greater for mothers and women victimized during the conflict.
Violent attacks have dampened the anniversary celebration of the peace agreement and 25 years of relative stability. The recent injury of a police detective by an IRA splinter group, reports of paramilitary-style attacks and the use of petrol bombs against the police, coupled with turf battles between Ulster factions are continuous reminders of the presence and power that paramilitary organizations still hold across Northern Ireland. Even today, communities are kept under siege through violence and ransom. The formal termination of violent conflicts through peace agreements, as in the case of the Good Friday Agreement and other prominent examples such as the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord, does not automatically imply the disbandment of armed organizations. The impact of the presence of (former) armed groups in people’s daily lives continues to be high in most post-conflict contexts.
Findings from surveys in other post-conflict environments mirror this long shadow of war. A study of Croat and Serbian youths showed the continued impact of the Yugoslav Wars on ethnic group identities and how continued communal segregation impacts inter-group ethnic attitudes towards out-groups. A recent study finds that a decade after the civil war in Sri Lanka people from previously warring sides have very different views of peace and security. Respondents who belong to the defeated minority ethnic group, the Tamils, provided a more negative assessment of security and ethnic relations than those from the victorious majority, the Sinhalese. They also reported seeing irregular armed groups in a more protective role rather than a threatening one, when they encountered them, as we show here. And in many post-war countries, it’s the police who threaten peace, as discussed in this post. A study on Liberia found that experiences during the war continued to impact perceptions of the police afterwards. Victims of rebel violence were later more trusting of the police, while victims of state-perpetrated violence were not.
Much research is rightly concerned about how to avoid the conflict trap. Yet even countries that avoid falling back into full-scale civil war oftentimes do not offer adequate security and peace for all groups of their civilian population. Continued vigilance of unequal experiences and perceptions of security are necessary to work towards meaningful and lasting peace.
Sabine C. Carey is Professor of Political Science at University of Mannheim. Marcela Ibáñez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Political Economy and Development at the University of Zurich. Eline Drury Løvlien is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Teacher Education.
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the Collaborative Research Center 884 “Political Economy of Reforms” at the University of Mannheim.
Guest post by María José Méndez
This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
In 2019, a 19-year-old woman detonated a grenade on a public bus in an extortion attempt in Guatemala City. Three years later, another woman was arrested for trying to smuggle ammunition and cell phones into a maximum-security prison in Honduras.
Accounts of criminal violence tend to portray women as passive victims. There are good reasons for this. Women are abused daily by criminal groups, especially in Latin America, where they are being killed at record rates. In Central America, women are victimized by gangs when they refuse sexual advances or protect their children from recruitment. In Mexico, they are forced into sex work by drug cartels, and their mutilated bodies are displayed to send messages to rival groups and the state.
Considering this rampant victimization, how important is the role that women play in criminal violence and what drives their participation? My research delves into this question by studying women affiliated with MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
While women have long played an active role in armed conflict, comprising as much as 30 percent of militant movements worldwide, the discussion around women’s involvement in violence tends to ignore contexts of organized crime and why women choose to stay in violent organizations.
In Central America, women are increasingly taking on lethal activities within gangs. This trend is also evident in other countries where women’s engagement in violent crime is also growing and diversifying. In Mexico and Colombia, where the number of female prisoners has more than doubled in the past decade, women have assumed prominent positions in drug trafficking organizations, with some even serving as leaders of their own criminal enterprises.
Several of the women I spoke with participated in hired killings and attacks against local business owners unable or unwilling to pay extortions. One former gang member said she felt “stronger than men” when given these missions; another spoke about regaining a sense of control, which had been shattered by a traumatic experience of rape. For both, participation in violence was a way of asserting power and earning respect from fellow gang members. For others, it was simply a way of surviving. As one put it to me, “In Honduras [t]here are no jobs for us […] But you must work to survive. We survive from contract killings, extortions, drug sales and kidnappings.”
Women’s contributions to violence also manifest in indirect ways, as revealed in a series of 2018 confiscated letters. In these letters, an imprisoned Honduran gang leader asks his wife to serve as a communication bridge with those outside, and to fulfill his daily needs. Requests for logistical support intermingled with demands for basic items, such as boxers and bars of soap, and reminders to give him and his children physical and emotional warmth.
As with armed conflict, criminal violence is made possible by a gender-based division of labor, where women bear the brunt of logistical and caregiving tasks. Most of these activities revolve around Central American prisons, which have become important nodes of decision-making for extortion schemes.
In a context of “mano dura” policies of mass incarceration and state persecution, which have imposed heavy constraints on gang members’ movements since the early 2000s, women have become pivotal in maintaining the complex operations that coordinate between gang members. The women I spoke with acted as the “eyes and hands” of imprisoned gang members, providing support in the transportation of weapons, transmission of messages, record-keeping, and intelligence gathering.
Some of these activities provided unexpected windows for enhancing their entrepreneurial and leadership skills. For instance, one woman who worked for her husband, a Salvadoran gang leader, spoke about how she leveraged this activity to offer paid courier services for other gang members on her own initiative. This allowed her to better support her children and ailing mother.
Gang-affiliated women also supply the basic services and goods—food, clothing, emotional support, childcare, and so on—necessary to sustain gang members and therefore their capacity to engage in the work of violence. One former gang member, for example, related how she was able to commit fully to the gang’s illicit activities because her aunt cared for her one-year-old son.
Women’s role in criminal violence is more important than we often realize. To acknowledge this role, we need to challenge traditional gender stereotypes that reduce criminal violence to a male phenomenon. We also need to challenge a prevalent assumption in research on women and organized violence: that women’s participation in lethal activities is simply the result of male manipulation or submission to patriarchal authority. This means paying attention to how women are also driven by their own aspirations for status and well-being.
Recognizing women’s complex agency in criminal violence, including the different labors they perform and the gendered factors shaping their involvement, is essential for helping address the unprecedented levels of criminal lethality affecting regions like Latin America. As scholars have argued, a clear understanding of the full range of women’s participation in violence can yield effective policy that gives women access to peace initiatives.
María José Méndez is an assistant professor in the Political Science department at the University of Toronto.
Guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly and Philip Luke Johnson
In 2020, a university campus in Bogotá, Colombia was festooned with flyers threatening “the children of professors that indoctrinate their students into communism.” A year earlier, a campus in Medellín was plastered with pamphlets, this time threatening students that engaged in political activity instead of quietly getting on with their studies. Both messages were signed by the Águilas Negras, a notorious criminal band. While the strength of this group has been disputed, for those targeted by the threats—and many besides—these messages could hardly be dismissed as anything less than terrifying.
These messages are hardly an isolated occurrence. Hundreds of threatening messages signed by the Águilas Negras have appeared across Colombia in recent years. Gangs in Brazil have published threatening messages in newspapers, while in Mexico, criminal actors sometimes use “narco-messages” to threaten rivals, officials, or other members of the public. Although the practice is relatively widespread, it raises questions about the behavior and power of criminal actors.
Most scholarship shows that criminal actors maintain a low profile, wielding power through clandestine means of coercion, corruption, and cooptation. Keeping a low profile reduces the costs of run-ins with rivals or the law. Criminal actors certainly do make use of public, sometimes spectacular violence, but primarily when the government is incapable or inefficient at punishing (or protecting) organized crime. Even so, most criminal actors moderate the frequency and visibility of their violence most of the time.
Threats are a particularly useful way to exert subtle power, as they leave no mark, no “smoking gun.” For a group with an established reputation, the mere whisper of a threat may be enough to induce compliance on the part of their targets (indeed, some actors with established reputations expend considerable resources to prevent pretenders from issuing threats in their name). Publicizing threats thus seems to undermine one of the main advantages of threats; the ability to coerce while reducing the risks associated with the actual use of violence. Why, then, would criminal actors publicize their threats to far wider audiences than the intended targets?
Our new research takes up this question by analyzing the content of threatening messages from four different criminal groups in Colombia and Mexico. These range from neo-paramilitary groups in Colombia, such as the Gaitanistas, to the pseudo-evangelical cartel, the Caballeros Templarios, in Mexico. Breaking the messages down into a “grammar” of their core elements—such as who is the target of the violence, what conditions are placed on the violence, and on whose behalf violence is threatened—we identify consistencies and variations in the use of public threats across these varied cases.
We find that when criminal actors publicize threats, they are projecting order; delineating their rules on the ground, dictating who (or what) is welcome and who will find no place on their turf. The threats may also induce compliance from the target, but the publicity serves this important additional function. The orders projected by different groups share some common elements: they position the criminal actors as mediators between the in-group of decent society and the out-group of deviants from that society (the threateners are also defining—sometimes with extreme prejudice—who they consider deviant). In positioning themselves as violent mediators, criminal actors displace other possible mediators, such as rival groups as well as non-violent civil society actors.
At the same time, the specific order projected varies across groups. Some groups threaten future violence that is conditional, while others threaten violence as the inevitable continuation of actions already occurring. Similarly, the specific in-group and out-group projected by threats varies. The Gaitanistas and Águilas Negras in Colombia both use the language of social cleansing, but the Águilas target an expansive out-group of leftists and alleged guerrilla sympathizers while barely mentioning an in-group, while the Gaitanistas invoke a national in-group but target only localized rivals.
Public threats can be quite low-tech, like the flyers that blanketed campuses in Colombia, but regardless of the medium, they aim to maximize publicity. This highlights the vital role of the media in impeding or permitting the projection of criminal orders. Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with criminal actors threatening and sometimes killing media workers to shape the flow of information (officials are also deeply implicated in this). Preserving the safety and autonomy of the press—even where reporting uncovers uncomfortable truths for those in power—is thus absolutely vital to limiting the influence of public threats and criminal orders. In interviews, however, journalists told us that the government protection mechanism is unreliable and often conditioned on favorable reporting.
Criminal governance is often treated as damaging the “fabric of society.” While we often think of this damage in terms of the direct use of violence, we need to examine not only how criminal actors kill, but also how they talk, persuade, and project. We also need to think about violence beyond the act itself; the hint or threat of violence can have powerful effects on direct targets and wider society. From a safe distance, we might question the low-tech or seemingly unsophisticated threats—pundits in Mexico initially mocked the poor spelling of narco-messages—but this does not mean that they are ineffective tools. Nor does it means that the people closer to the threats can afford to discount them.
Shauna N. Gillooly (@ShaunaGillooly) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute housed at William and Mary, and an affiliated researcher with Instituto PENSAR at Pontifica Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. Philip Luke Johnson (@phillegitimate) is a lecturer at Princeton University.
Guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly
The last time the Colombian government and the leftist rebel group the National Liberation Army (ELN) began negotiations in 2018, they were disrupted by a car bomb set off in Bogota, which killed 20. The ELN claimed responsibility for the bomb, which immediately ended negotiations. Now, the government and the rebels are back at the negotiating table.
The ELN formed in the 1960s, and has since established a transnational presence across Colombia and Venezuela, and controls much of the illicit economies along the border of the two countries. A peace accord with the group could significantly improve security in both Colombia and Venezuela, but the obstacles to peace are significant.
Official peace negotiations tend to reflect the ways that war is waged, and ownership of these processes often reinforces pre-existing power structures and dynamics in a society. Social inclusion and integration can have positive consequences for the sustainability of peace accords and their implementation, but peace processes often exclude rather than include. Past research shows that women’s exclusion in peace processes can be seen as the canary in the coal mine—“a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes.”
Women’s participation in peace negotiations and peace processes creates more durable and lasting peace, and peace deals signed by women have higher rates of implementation. Yet, women continue to be primarily excluded from these processes. Between 1992 and 2011, only 2 percent of chief mediators and 9 percent of negotiators in peace processes were women.
With many Colombian citizens unhappy with the implementation of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC, another leftist rebel group), the negotiations with the ELN face a new challenge—skepticism. What can experience from the peace negotiations with the FARC tell us about the likelihood that women—and other groups—will be involved in this new round of negotiations with the ELN—and thus, about the durability of the negotiated peace?
In my new research, I conducted interviews with 25 members of both the Colombian government and the FARC negotiation teams who participated in peace negotiations in 2016, to understand how they viewed women’s participation. I interviewed main table negotiators, negotiators who were at the gender and ethnic sub-committee tables, people who worked as researchers and secretaries, and women who gave testimony during negotiations.
I found that initially, no women were included in the negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government. In fact, it was through civil society pressures, primarily from feminist and women’s organizations, that the government appointed female negotiators. Some interviewees—both men and women—agreed that women’s participation in the 2016 accords was more than sufficient, with one stating that “this is the most involvement that women have ever had in a peace process before.” Others disagreed, stating that the creation of a sub-committee for gender had allowed gendered concerns to be siloed during the negotiation process, and that the final product of the accords reflected that. Still, others said that neither the government nor the FARC were committed to gendered concerns, and that it was only through the pressure placed on both parties by civil society organizations that women were included at the highest levels of negotiation and that gendered concerns were “taken seriously” at the main table.
I found that with a few exceptions, in Colombia, most women were mid-level negotiators, advisors, spokespersons, and secretaries. It was only through the mobilization of women’s and feminist groups that there was some representation of gender diversity at the Havana negotiations.
While conducting interviews with government and FARC negotiators, I included some questions about the ELN negotiations as a way to examine if negotiators felt that the inclusion of women at the table would continue to increase in future peace processes. Respondents were dubious about both the ELN’s and the government’s commitments to gender inclusion in this process.
Despite the benefits, women’s participation in peace processes is still not taken seriously—and not only in Colombia. Feminist activists in Eritrea have lamented the lack of women’s inclusion in nascent peace processes between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and women’s contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process are still downplayed today.
With the new Colombian administration’s commitment to “total peace,” there are many lessons to be learned from the FARC negotiation and implementation process. If Colombian President Petro and his administration want to achieve its ambitious goals toward creating sustainable peace, more robust social and gender inclusion from the ground floor of these peace talks is key.
Shauna N. Gillooly (@ShaunaGillooly) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute housed at William & Mary.
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