Archive | July, 2018

Letter to Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley MP

26 Jul

Dear Karen,

I hope you do not mind me intruding on the parliamentary recess and offering the unasked-for advice that follows. But, you see, I think you do need some advice related to your day job as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Remember that? The day job?

As you know, the devolved Assembly that was established under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has not been sitting for over 18 months. It is your job to getting it back to work – and thus to get one of the major world achievements of the 1990s – a comprehensive peace accord in Northern Ireland – back on track. It is a difficult task and let’s face it, the principal political parties that you have to work with – the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Féin – have very different aims and absolutely loathe one another. And then there is your own political party: it’s is at war with itself over Brexit. So you could be forgiven for pulling the bedcovers over your eyes on a Monday morning and thinking ‘I don’t want to go into the office today’. Believe me, sometimes I have the same feelings about Manchester.

Anyway, I hope you don’t mind if I observe that since taking over as Northern Ireland Secretary of State you don’t seem to have had much impact. Admittedly, you have a tough task but the impression of many observers is that you could try a bit harder with the day job. I read something the other day that compared your dedication to the job unfavourably with that of your predecessor, James Brokenshire. That must have hurt. To call his tenure as undistinguished would be unkind to the undistinguished.

Here’s my unasked for advice … it comes in two parts. The first part is a bit blunt but sometimes things need to be said in a straightforward manner. The second bit is somewhat more nuanced. So here comes the blunt bit: In order to do your job it might actually help if you spent a little bit of time in Northern Ireland. We all know it isn’t your dream job, but you said yes to it and are happy to accept the frills (and cash) that go with it. Your attendance in Northern Ireland is something akin to David Davis’ attendance in Brussels when he was in charge of the Brexit negotiations. If we were talking about school attendance then, at this point, social workers would be involved. Is it really up to another adult to tell you that in order to do your job you have to be prepared to travel to Northern Ireland and show a bit of effort?

The second bit of advice on getting the devolved Assembly up and running is to think about harnessing people power. If you talked to people in Northern Ireland – that is real people outside of your protected bubble – you would know that they are utterly fed up with what they see as a political class who are not terribly interested in getting the Assembly up and running. Democratic Unionist and Sinn Féin antipathy for one another outweighs any perceived advantages they see in cutting a deal. This is facilitated – in part – by direct rule that means most public services function more or less as normal. This is where your opportunity is. There are a few pinch points: budgets and decisions delayed because of the stasis at Stormont. People care about frontline public services. Dinner table conversations revolve around hospital appointments, school places and the he pothole on the road just by the Centra. There is space for a campaigning Secretary of State to build on public resentment and turn it into something positive. There is a golden opportunity to hold a series of public meetings all across Northern Ireland that would highlight the delays and how the inability to put the powersharing deal back together again is having a real impact on everyday life. You are the one with the data to know where the pinch points are and where they will be. You are the one with other data – polling and intelligence – that could make this work. You could turn this into a mass movement that would not necessarily have to rely on a Northern Ireland civil society that is – well – a bit tired. It would require energy, charisma and commitment. It is not unkind to say that those qualities have not been evident in your first months in the job, but you could surprise us.

What I am suggesting is a summer road show. It would get you out of the security bubble (honestly, no one is going to hurt you – especially if you tell people that you want to make life better). It would give you an opportunity to get people on your side. Fundamentally, it would scare the main political parties if they could see that they were being outflanked from the ground up. You could work on a rhetoric that elected politicians should do their job, that public services are at risk, that public services will decline if politicians don’t get their act together. The nature of power-sharing means that parties from opposing groups do not have to like one another – but they do have to work together. These are simple messages that could be repeated night after night in a series of town hall meetings. It would be truly non-partisan as it would be shaming the Democratic Unionist and Sinn Féin. They will try to bang the ethno-nationalist drum about culture war, but if you stick to the theme of public services there is a real chance of having an effect.

And, the people that probably matter to you most – the chatterati in London and political/media elite – would take note. Look at Gavin Williamson and Michael Gove – not particularly likeable people but they have gained a reputation for being passionate about their brief (Williamson) and having mastered the detail and being full of initiative (Gove).

Or you could stay in London, visit Northern Ireland very occasionally, and give the impression that you couldn’t care less.

Yours truly,

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The anthropology of dog-walking

12 Jul

The anthropology of dog-walking

I am not an anthropologist, but I want to be one when I grow up. There has been a noticeable ‘turn’ towards anthropological methods in the study of peace and conflict, and international relations more generally, over the past decade or so. It coincides with a lending and borrowing of concepts and methods from sociology and feminism too as peace and conflict scholars have moved beyond looking at institutions and combatants to take a whole-of-society approach to their subject.

While anthropologists are rightfully suspicious of those who claim to use ‘ethnography’ without training and a deep grounding in the literature, many have been generous in encouraging peace and conflict scholars to use ‘ethnographically-influenced’ methods in their research. I would like to showcase the anthropology of the dog-walk, or how walking a dog (or dogs) allows you to see sides of a community that you ordinarily would not. I have been a dog owner for about 12 years – first for Paddy a loveable but scheming chocolate Labrador and now Ted and Bess, black and chocolate Labradors. In York, then St Andrews, and now in rural southern Scotland I have walked these dogs three or four times a day around villages, along lanes and across beaches.

Walking along familiar routes, often at reasonably set times of the day, allows you to engage in and with a community in different ways. I have never used my dog-walking for research purposes (most of my research is overseas) but it has encouraged me to think about research processes and the value of ‘slow research’ – or repeated and close-level engagement with the same site. Here are four advantages of research observation by walking a dog (or dogs):

Firstly, you get to meet people and speak with them. I lived – dog-less – in York for about five years. In that time I really only knew academic colleagues. They were completely unrepresentative of the city. None of us came from York, listened to the local radio station, or read the local paper. It was a very insular life. Very often I would give the dog his lunchtime walk in a large park near my house. Other dog walkers would gather and we would spend a few minutes chatting while the dogs played and sniffed each other. This was a very different York: van drivers, care-givers, single mums. It was working class and unvarnished with a good deal of xenophobia but also an honesty and lack of sophistry that I hugely appreciated. The dog-network allowed me to see a side to York that campus life excluded. I heard about the issues that affected people and how they saw their own city. That pattern of being able to meet so-called ordinary people – through the technique of walking a dog – has been replicated everywhere else I have lived.

Secondly, you notice the small things. I usually walk the dogs at set times: first thing in the morning, lunchtime, teatime and last thing at night. Three of these walks will be 30 minutes plus (usually longer) and the bedtime one is usually 10 minutes. There are a limited number of places that one can walk nearby so I will often walk the same routes several times a week. And it is here that you notice things. In particular, you notice the small things: a car parked in an unusual position, a new garden decoration, a freshly painted fence. All of this probably is of negligible social significance, but it does allow you to piece together a picture of a community: who is well networked, who never has visitors, who is more prosperous, who is house-proud, who doesn’t give a damn? Although it is simply walking around with your eyes open, I like to think that it is the amalgamation of multiple data points that gives you a comprehensive picture of a community.

Thirdly, it gives you an excuse to go places that ordinarily you would not go. Acquire a dog and a lead and immediately you are empowered to walk up lanes, around the margins of fields, and places that it would be odd to go if you did not have a dog in tow. You can see views of the locality that you otherwise would not. Particularly in rural areas, the topography explains much of the political economy and the built environment: who had access to the good land, who had the water, why does the road take that odd turn? A dog allows you to be noisy – to walk to that hilltop to get the view and to go behind those farm buildings and find the water-source that explains why the community was built there.

Fourthly, you move (reasonably) slowly. The pace of research (or at least the expectation that we publish often and have impact) seems to be increasing. Walking a dog allows you time-out. That’s good for thinking time and our mental health. But it allows us to make ‘slow observations’ – to see something, to study it, to hazard a guess why it is like that. I often pass things that puzzle me (why has the farmer dumped that there, why are there so many cars at that house, why is that place busier than usual today?). By slowly ambling past – because the dogs have found something interesting to sniff – you can usually get the answer.

I am not suggesting that we all find and dog and bring it on ‘fieldwork’. I can think of multiple reasons why that would be inappropriate and impractical. I am, instead, celebrating the value of walking and keeping you eyes open. None of this uses Nvivo, draws on the corpus of dead French philosophers, or involves the construction of a dataset. It does involve the genius of dogs though.