Dr. Giada Laganà

Tracing the origins of European Union (EU) approaches to peacebuilding: the European Community (EC) and the Northern Ireland Hunger Strikes

A common European Union (EU) approach to issues of political violence and peacebuilding has begun to take shape in recent years as part of the development of the union’s peacebuilding strategy. Little has been written, however, about its early development. This project aims to trace its genesis by examining the European Community’s (EC) response to the Irish Republican hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. The hunger strikes, by Irish republican prisoners, were the culmination of a five-year protest during the Northern Ireland conflict. They constituted the very first instance of where political violence and peacebuilding emerged in the ministerial discussions of European institutions, and, particularly of the European Parliament (EP).
By bridging Political Science with History and Governmentality theory, this research explores historically how major debates relating to the Northern Ireland hunger strikes translated into new EU peacebuilding policy practices in Northern Ireland. These, in turn, produced political change at the national and, particularly, at the European level as they highlighted the need for the then EC to create a more comprehensive strategy of peacebuilding. By employing qualitative methods for collecting and analysing empirical data, semi-structured interviews, as well as analysis of primary and secondary sources such as archival sources that have never been used before (EP motions for resolution, plenary debates and the private correspondence of the then EP President, Simone Veil), this project aims at providing new theoretical insights critical for understanding how the problematisation of national political grand narratives at the European level translated theories into peacebuilding policy practices.

Biographical Note

Dr. Giada Laganà is a Research Assistant at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD), School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. She has previously worked at the Wales Governance Centre on the ESRC ‘Between Two Unions’ project with Professor Daniel Wincott, examining the impact of the United Kingdom’s (UK) withdrawal from the European Union (EU) on the UK’s internal constitutional and intergovernmental arrangements. She has recently completed a book, published with Palgrave McMillan, entitled The European Union and the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Giada started out as an historian, completing her undergraduate studies in modern and contemporary history at the University of Pavia (Italy). She then obtained an MA in international relations and history, under the joint supervision of Didier Poton (Université de La Rochelle) and Michel Catala (Université de Nantes).