Overview

Friend, enemy; loyalist, traitor: politics today seems caught in the grip of a binary reduction machine. Bidding us either with or against our neighbors as though we were already combined in, and owed allegiance to, mutually external, nameable collective entities - ‘communities’, ‘nations’, ‘races’ – denominations in general. Beginning with an examination of processes (‘routines’) of denomination in Northern Ireland, Maurice Macartney examines the era of Empire and enslavement to show that similar processes were at work then in ‘viceregally’ arranged structures for the authorization and organization of the violence of hostility and of indifference to the suffering of others. Macartney then brings the analysis up to date, arguing that the hostility of populism and the indifference of the global market overlap to intensify the violence unfolding today. Finally, taking seriously the Copernican revolution of nonviolence, for which the enemy is not ‘the enemy’, but violence itself, the book calls for a different kind of combination, for the coming together of a ‘community of others’, commoners on the one common, working, for all our differences, toward the democratic empowerment of everyone in the neighborhood, in an equitable, sustainable, ‘neighborhood democracy’ that would open beyond hostility, beyond denomination, beyond all boundaries.

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9781666916218

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Reviews

"""Sectarian stalemate and violence, long characteristic of politics in Northern Ireland, seem today to be the politics of us all. In this highly readable, engaging and erudite book McCartney sets out from Northern Ireland to understand such 'denominational politics', the ways we divide ourselves and each other by naming who is and who cannot be 'one of us'. Intermingling personal experience and philosophical reflection, reading political speeches alongside fables, films and other fictions, he explains how authoritarian and populist forms of politics work and finds a path towards more open-ended ways of thinking and of weaving together a politics of democratic neighborliness beyond violence. This is a lively, hopeful and deeply humane book of interest to anyone involved in projects aimed at giving new life to the ideal of democratic free association and combination""."

"""Sectarian stalemate and violence, long characteristic of politics in Northern Ireland, seem today to be the politics of us all. In this highly readable, engaging and erudite book McCartney sets out from Northern Ireland to understand such 'denominational politics', the ways we divide ourselves and each other by naming who is and who cannot be 'one of us'. Intermingling personal experience and philosophical reflection, reading political speeches alongside fables, films and other fictions, he explains how authoritarian and populist forms of politics work and finds a path towards more open-ended ways of thinking and of weaving together a politics of democratic neighborliness beyond violence. This is a lively, hopeful and deeply humane book of interest to anyone involved in projects aimed at giving new life to the ideal of democratic free association and combination"". --Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia"

Author Information

Maurice Macartney is currently a member of the Migrant and Minority Ethnic Thinktank, for whom he has written reports on issues affecting minoritised communities in Northern Ireland, coordinated responses to Government consultations and for whom he makes the video and podcast series ‘MME Matters’, covering issues such as race-relations in Northern Ireland.

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