Scared of What's Behind You: Negotiating a Double Minority Dilemma in Northern Ireland and Cyprus

Abstract

Despite striking similarities between Northern Ireland and Cyprus, both in terms of the nature of their conflicts and the attempts made to resolve these tensions, the turn of the 21st century saw the success of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the failure of the Annan Plan in Cyprus. This thesis stems from the question: why did complex negotiation fail to produce a settlement in Cyprus but succeed in Northern Ireland? I argue that domestic perceptions of the relationships of third-parties had a significant impact upon the conflict parties’ bargaining positions due the framing of a Double Minority Dilemma. A double minority occurs where both (or several) parties in the conflict see themselves as the minority under threat because they are preoccupied with the power and authority they perceive to be behind their opponent. Through a bridging of literature on minority nationalism with that on security dilemmas and ontological security, I develop the Double Minority Dilemma as a framework for analysing third-party influence on domestic elite bargaining positions that centres these competing perceptions of minority identity. Each additional intervening player in these conflicts, or ‘third-party,’ contributes to the security dilemma of the double minority condition. The thesis further contributes a unique conceptualization of third-party relationships from the perspective of domestic elites by framing third-party relationships in terms of their perceived form and distance to the Double Minority Dilemma, with highly internationalized contexts having more distant relationships. This dissertation format is article-based (or in Portfolio format), and thus comprised of three independent articles alongside an introduction and conclusion. The substantive articles build and apply the Double Minority Dilemma framework in Northern Ireland and Cyprus using a cross-case comparison and two within-case diachronic comparisons, which together examine several different negotiation processes in each case. The three articles demonstrate how critical junctures in third-party relationships framed by the Double Minority Dilemma led to changing domestic elite perceptions and strategic decisions in negotiations over time. The thesis ultimately provides a policy-relevant framework for guiding third-parties when engaging with certain conflict contexts such that their interventions may be peace-producing rather than conflict escalating.