Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. How does Brexit change Northern Ireland’s system of government? Could it unravel crucial parts of Northern Ireland’s peace process? What are the wider implications of the arrangements for the Irish and UK constitutions?
Northern Ireland presents some of the most difficult Brexit dilemmas.
Negotiations between the UK and the EU have set out how issues like citizenship, trade, the border, human rights and constitutional questions may be resolved. But the long-term impact of Brexit isn’t clear.
This thorough analysis draws upon EU, UK, Irish and international law, setting the scene for a post-Brexit Northern Ireland by showing what the future might hold.
75 5 Reconsidering borders Why borders matter A recurrent theme in this volume is that the world in which public policy actors seek to move towards their preferred futures is an increasingly complex one. One dimension of this increasing complexity in policymaking is in the relationship between the territorial scale of existing political and administrative jurisdictions, such as nation states on a map, and the scale of major policy problems. From clean rivers, to population health, to migration, to crime, to macroeconomic management, to climate change
This book responds to global tendencies toward increasingly restrictive border controls and populist movements targeting migrants for violence and exclusion. Informed by Marxist theory, it challenges standard narratives about immigration and problematises commonplace distinctions between ‘migrants’ and ‘workers’. Using Britain as a case study, the book examines how these categories have been constructed and mobilised within representations of a ‘migrant crisis’ and a ‘welfare crisis’ to facilitate capitalist exploitation. It uses ideas from grassroots activism to propose alternative understandings of the relationship between borders, migration and class that provide a basis for solidarity.
TWO Borders and walls Introduction On 22 August 2017, Leo Varadkar, the newly elected Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, paid a visit to the US–Canada border. Varadkar was wrapping up his official tour of Canada, where he had sought to closely align himself with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The two leaders were photographed together at state functions, diplomatic trade talks and marching in the Montreal Pride Parade, where they smiled and waved at the crowds in matching button-down shirts and chino combos. While the Canadian tour was
Cross-border livestock theft occurs within the context of influences such as religion and wars and across rivers, mountains and oceans. Any attempt to discuss cross-border livestock theft is futile without conceptualizing the context of a border. A border can have an unprecedented number of meanings: the border between two farms; the boundary between police precincts; different policing counties; between states or provinces internally within a country; and between countries. No matter what determines country borders or boundaries between whom and whatever
The experiencing of migratory processes allowed active and passive migrants to engage with what I conceptualized as transformative border politics. To define it, a distinction must be first made between formal and informal border politics—the former referring to the formal mechanisms that establish geographical, political, and social boundaries from the top-down , and the latter referring to the informal processes and practices that sustain, reproduce, and challenge these from the bottom-up . With this contrast in mind, this research showed how active and
TWO Navigating the Irish border [I]t is better that we should not even mention Partition in international assemblies, for our doing so would savour of the old coercionist policy of enlisting outside support against our fellow-countrymen, and, like that policy, would merely irritate without effecting any useful purpose. (Donal Barrington, 1957, p 400) Introduction Discussion of the challenges that the Irish border poses for Brexit has tended to quite literally size up the problem; the border, we are solemnly informed, is 310 miles in length, features over
Figure 9.1: Map signed by Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, enclosed in Paul Cambon’s 9 May 1916 letter to Sir Edward Grey President Donald Trump, before leaving office, had hoped the United States could be walled off from Mexico on its southern border to combat the flow of bodies from the south. Pressures on the borders of the European Union, a direct consequence of recent wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, remind us of the porous and impermanent nature of all state lines. The trigger response of states on Europe’s eastern front, as of
This chapter explores borders, and the relations of helping that happen both inside and outside of these borders, and perhaps most important, about the ‘logic of the between’ (Cooper and Law, 2016 , p 207) that works to constitute various and precarious thresholds between these locations. We start with an idea, in many respects rather obvious, that we cannot use a term like ‘help’ with preconceived notions about what help means – that it is not really known in advance what ‘help’ will look like for a particular family. As Büscher and his colleagues ( 2011
Questions of migration and citizenship are at the heart of global political debate with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump having ripple effects around the world.
Providing new insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the UK and the US, this book challenges the increasingly prevalent view of migration and migrants as threats and of formal citizenship as a necessary marker of belonging. Instead the authors offer an analysis of migration and citizenship in practice, as a counterpoint to simplistic discourses.
The book uses cutting-edge academic work on migration and citizenship to address three themes central to current debates – borders and walls, mobility and travel, and belonging. Through this analysis a clearer picture of the roots of these politics emerges as well as of the consequences for mobility, political participation and belonging in the 21st century.
