How do persistent, seemingly intractable conflicts get resolved? Why do actors who had long worked with aims and assumptions that made conflict zero sum suddenly change? Was the seeming intractability of conflict an illusion, the actors’ positions easily open to compromise? Why then did earlier attempts at settlement fail? Scholarship has found many factors and mechanisms that predispose towards settlement. In Northern Ireland, and no doubt in other long-run conflicts, each and every one of these mechanisms is to be found. This is not to say that they are all causally important, or equally so, in the attainment of settlement. Moreover some of the factors that have been argued to lead to settlement are continuous - remedying horizontal inequality, remedying state exclusion - and one needs a way of theorising at which point on the continuum enough has been done to constitute grounds for settlement.
The puzzles are exemplified in discussion of explanations of the Northern Ireland settlement. Different models of explanation are discussed. The paper argues for an historical-structural model, which focuses on the pattern of relationships - between states and populations - which have underlain conflict. Such an approach - in principle - allows us to explain changes in actors’ positions, the attractiveness and credibility of accords in meeting conflicts of interest, and the revision of zero-sum ideologies and myths. It also gives a criterion by which to judge the likely stability of a settlement and the ways that its stability may be increased.
However operationalising the approach, making its concepts generalisable and assessable empirically, and showing its usefulness even in one conflict, is more difficult. This is attempted here, again primarily in the context of explaining the move from violence in Northern Ireland.
