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Analysing Epistemologies: ‘Problematizing’ the Problem
The positivist research design outlined presumes the possibility of objectively
measuring the degree of community division in areas of Belfast. This is necessarily
founded on a static view of remaining dissensions. Using the thought experiment
example, positivism’s proposition to detect the cause of a variable (community
division) and alter it via a corrective system (murals) requires one to assume a onedimensional relationship between the knowledge involved – reason for division – and
the exercise of power – ability to ameliorate the negative causal variable.
Positivist intervention in this scenario risks what Vaughn-Williams (2006: 514)
terms, “problematizing the problem”, meaning that the static vision of community
division necessarily underpinning a positivist approach sees a complex pheno menon
in an ongoing social environment as a fixed problem with discernible and alterable
causes. The effect of such research is to reinforce the very variables it seeks to
change. The inherent empiricism of positivism requires the phenomenon being
researched to be abstracted: communal division in Northern Ireland exists ‘out there’
with solvable causes.
As Vaughn-Williams’ phrase suggests, attempts to solve the causes of ongoing
conflict in divided societies can exacerbate the situation by reproducing ways of
thinking which conceal the revelation that “identifying something as a problem in the
first place is… to take a stance in relation to it” (Edkins 2006: 502). In the case of
Northern Irish communal divisions there has been a lack of critical interrogation of
the two community theses used to explain the cause of conflict. 5 Positivism, in
searching for universal social laws reinforces the idea of the Northern Ireland conflict
possessing a singular cause: that it is an ethno-national dispute.6 In so doing the
multiplicities of trauma and violence that mark contemporary Northern Ireland are
For further discussion of the effect of the two community theses on Belfast’s typography, see
McAtackney (2011). For the Northern Ireland context being framed as ethno-national see McGarry and
O’Leary (1995: 6) who describe the conflict as “ethnic war”.
6
For further discussion of the ways in which analysis of conflict in Northern Ireland has been
pervaded by uncritical explanations of the violence as tribal, irrational and ethnically motivated see
Miller (1998) and McGrattan (2010: 181); the latter highlights the lack of explanatory value in
analyses which cite ethnic division as the primary cause as these propose ethnic division as both the
initiating circumstance and end result.
5