Countering disengagement and polarisation

Countering disengagement and polarisation: lessons from translocal constitutional deliberation

Speaker: Professor Emerita Jennifer Todd, University College Dublin

Chair: Professor Louise Mallinder, Queen’s University Belfast

A major problem in contemporary democracies lies in the confluence of widespread popular disengagement from politics and extreme polarisation over some political topics. Both phenomena have long coexisted in conflict zones. There is increasing discussion of processes that can counter these trends, in particular 'everyday peacemaking', transversal participation, and deliberation. Our recent experiments on translocal grassroots constitutional deliberation were designed to access each process, and to remedy some of the limits of each.

In this paper I outline the theoretical reasons why translocal dimension is likely to be an important factor in reengaging public interest and depolarising contentious questions, I describe our experiments, and report on the ongoing analysis which tests out which mechanisms did – and didn’t – work to reengage participants and depolarise constitutional discussion.

Biography

Jennifer Todd is full Professor (emeritus) in Politics and Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at UCD and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She has written on conflict, identity, ethnicity, and routes out of conflict, and is presently (with J. Ruane) writing a sequel to their CUP Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland. This paper draws on her recent research with Joanne McEvoy and Shelley Deane on ‘Constitutional visions from the grassroots’ (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/423/article/983342/pdf funded by DFA Reconciliation Fund and the ARINS project)

Professor Louise Mallinder

Louise Mallinder is Interim Director of the Queen’s Institute for Peace, Security, and Justice and a Professor of Law and at Queen’s University Belfast. At the University of Chicago she is a Faculty Affiliate of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and was the 2024 Pozen Professor of Human Rights. She holds a PhD in law, an LLM in human rights law, and BA in economic and social history and politics, all from Queen’s University Belfast.

Louise’s book Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize and the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association Early Career Prize. She is co-editing The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace, and co-authored Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (2022).

Louise is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group, and of the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges. She was Chair of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights non-governmental organization based in Belfast, during 2015-2020, and was Vice-Chair during 2013-2015 and 2020-2024.