Policing the Two Communities

The two communities model formed the basis of much of the governmental approach to policy direction in Northern Ireland from the late 1980s and was enshrined in the text of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement of 1998. State papers provide a conduit for understanding how government officials thought through the implications of the model and how they were themselves constrained by (strained) Anglo-Irish relations and the ongoing campaigns of terror organizations. The chapter elaborates the Rancièrean concern with counting to illustrate how the pluralizing ethic of the two communities approach is ultimately inherently paradoxical, depending as it does on the unsustainable identification of incommensurabilities.