title: The political economy of post-conflict Northern Ireland: The contribution of worker cooperatives
Creators: name: Perrin, Eleonore
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: Northern Ireland provides a complex portrait of a divided post-conflict society, one where neoliberal economics are embedded into a fragmented landscape, emulating rather than transcending polarisation between divided communities. Indeed, peace processes are amongst the “competitive strategies” for the continuation of the neoliberal political project, dominant in both academic literature and practice of peacebuilding. As the politics of neoliberalisation have become common ground within political elites otherwise busy planning their countermove on the political chessboard of ethnic-resource competition, peace has failed to materialise as improved living standards for some of Northern Ireland’s poorest communities. As a result, the neoliberal reading of peacebuilding economics is coming under increasing criticism. Yet, beyond the institutional addiction to neoliberalism on the one hand, and its critique on the other, there is a lack of imagination as to what an alternative, progressive and inclusive post-conflict transformation looks like. Northern Ireland’s political battleground may not leave much space for alternatives, but it does not mean they do not exist. In fact, the exploration of new repertoires for more progressive and shared politics is precisely what this research aims to investigate. This PhD research consists of an empirical, qualitative study of worker cooperatives in Northern Ireland. Worker cooperatives provide a new terrain of investigation, building on existing literature by investigating the overlooked role worker cooperatives play in providing an alternative rhetoric to place-making in a divided society. The engaged, embedded ethnographic approach to research (with in-depth interviews and participant observation) led to a significant set of interviews with worker cooperatives, the wider cooperative sector and key stakeholders. This body of work points to the processes and complexities at play in actually existing alternative economies in the Northern Irish case study, highlighting as much the therapeutic practices they foster, the desire for emancipation they respond to and the anti-capitalist and anti-sectarian politics they are driven by. The research also explores the competing claims over the meaning of the social economy that play out in policy, between opposing notions of charity and entrepreneurship on one side, solidarity and cooperation on the other, eliciting the wider contestation as to the meaning of peace in a divided society and the power dynamics that drive the exclusion of alternative economic narratives. This study aims to contribute to emerging academic debates on social and diverse economies: the research fills a gap between the critique of a neoliberal interpretation of peacebuilding and on the other hand, the envisioning of alternative economies. However, the research also engages critically by drawing from the compassionate gaze that feminist geographers have called upon when investigating alternative economies, while critically assessing the forceful limitations imposed upon them, the compromises they engage in, and the institutional attempts at co-option they confront. Finally, informed by the analysis of institutional challenges faced by worker cooperatives, the research provides lessons for promoting cooperative economies.