From Zero Sum to Three Strands: Diplomatic Leadership and the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Leadership is often conceptualised as a public endeavour, with dimensions that are both personal and collective. However, in some contexts, purposeful leadership can be both publicly impactful and obscured from the general gaze. This paper sets out to do three things. Firstly, will explore leadership and leadership behaviours of a small organisational unit (the Anglo-Irish Division of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs) in the context of the resolution of an intractable and multi-dimensional problem – the Northern Ireland conflict. Secondly, it will look at the development of organisational purpose over an extended timeframe - in this case thirty years, and how it connects to action; and thirdly it will explore what we can learn about how to better engage with seemingly unresolvable problems from the conflict transformation experience of Northern Ireland.

This paper is one outcome of a wider project which looks in detail at the role of the Anglo-Irish Division of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. This Division was formally tasked with managing relationships with political and community actors in Northern Ireland throughout the conflict and as the primary liaison with both London and Washington(Doyle 2004, Wolff and Dursun-Özkanca 2012, McLoughlin and Meagher 2019). It draws on a range of data, which includes two sets of semi structured interviews (71 in total) with high-ranking diplomats who served within the Division as well as some political and other governmental actors who worked with them. In addition, it draws on personal documentation gathered from interviewees and extensive British and Irish archival sources. The study design was guided by a concern for developing a processual and temporal understanding of how an unfolding process of engagement and activity yielded particular outcomes, overtime and in a volatile and dangerous context (Walsh and Bartunek 2011).

In doing this, the paper looks at the underlying and generally obscured leadership practices of Irish diplomats in their engagement with the Northern Ireland peace process over a period of thirty years. Those interviewed defined their purpose almost universally as “Peace”. It explores this purposeful leadership as a collective endeavour, exercised over time and indeed generations, with the aim of creating lasting change. Actions over this time focused on the long and painstaking process of building a critical mass of support for a fundamental reframing of the conflict around three sets of relationships (Murphy, Denyer et al. 2020) and away from its former zero sum conceptualisation. The paper will explore how this process was enacted organisationally, including how culture was managed at periods of high tension and extreme violence, how networks of trust were built internally and externally, how morale was managed in the worst of days(Grey, 2012), the norms and strategies adopted, the impact of secrecy and knowledge, the relative nature of autonomy and of the institutional entrepreneurship that lay behind key periods of action. This paper contends that violence and the transition from it are organisational challenges, as well as a political and community challenges (Murphy 2020) and that this aspect of organisational life is under researched.

The experience of the Northern Ireland peace process is a rare example of successful system wide change which has been maintained despite repeated system shocks. Recent scholarship has underlined the need for theorists to move beyond intra organisational perspectives and to look more critically at how individuals and organizations can and do contribute to collective action and system wide change (Grint 2010, Ferraro, Etzion et al. 2015). This study of the Anglo-Irish Division is an opportunity to understand better how persistent organisational action and individual and collective agency can contribute to the resolution of intractable social problems, such as ethno-political conflict processes.


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Murphy, J., D. Denyer and A. Pettigrew (2020). "The Role of Framing Mechanisms in Explaining System-Wide Change: The Case of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process." British Journal of Management n/a(n/a).
Walsh, I. J. and J. M. Bartunek (2011). "Cheating the Fates: Organizational Foundings in the Wake of Demise." Academy of Management Journal 54(5): 1017-1044.