A selection of mini-models designed to provide an insight into the ongoing work of 'Writing Peace' and to demonstrate Quill's approach to visualising the archive material and tracking the process of negotiation. This collection is still under construction.
People: 18,
Procedures: ,
Documents: 58,
Decisions: 24
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This negotiation contains a selection of mini-models designed to provide an insight into the ongoing work of 'Writing Peace' and to demonstrate Quill's approach to visualising the archive material and tracking the process of negotiation. It differs from our usual approach in that we will be presenting only certain documents and moments in isolation, rather than including everything tabled during the course of a negotiation. This collection is still under construction, and we will be regularly adding small amounts of new material.
Prisoners Section of the Mitchell Draft
This mini-model has been created to represent a section of the Monica McWilliams collection relating to amendments to the 'Prisoners' section of the 6th/7th April Mitchell Draft. Although, unlike the NIWC text on victims being worked up in parallel, these particular amendments did not make it into the Good Friday Agreement, they do provide one small snapshot of the frenetic markup and re-drafting process that took place within the party offices after the late (and late night) appearance of the draft agreement. The NIWC's commitment to broadening participation in democracy was at the heart of their version of this process, and this model demonstrates how amendments emerged in dialogue with experts from NIACRO, a voluntary organization working to reduce crime and re-offending. It is also interesting to note that the two-year timeline set for prisoner release in the final draft of the agreement accords with the recommendation made by NIACRO and the amendment proposed by the NIWC.
Evolution of the Human Rights Language in the Good Friday Agreement
This mini-model was created to accompany Professor Christopher McCrudden's presentation to the Agreement 25 Conference at Queen's University, Belfast. It traces the history and evolution of the language that eventually became the Human Rights section of the Good Friday Agreement. We hope that visualizing the development of that language will help us understand its context and significance. A wide range of documents are included, beginning with early drafts of the Joint Declaration and culminating in the final Agreement, and a wide range of actors are identified as part of the process of producing them. The mini-model is still incomplete at the moment, and we aim to expand it as we source more drafts of the various documents involved and the papers that put them in context.
Downing Street Declaration and Framework Documents
This mini-model is still under construction. The editors aim to assemble a comprehensive (but non-exhaustive) collection of drafts of the Downing Street Joint Declaration to track how the text developed over time. We are also working on a more comprehensive model that will include the meetings where the declaration was under consideration, track the process of amendment, and detail further annotations made to each draft. This detailed model is forthcoming in December 2023.
Part of: Writing Peace.
This page shows the complete source-material for this negotiation.
Users with the appropriate permission can use this screen to make changes to the convention records from here.
This page gives access to the main visualizations used to explore the work of committees or individuals.
It is the best place to start if you have specific research questions to investigate.
This view shows a timeline of the events with an indication the
flow of documents between committees.
This will help make sense of the relationship between committees. The page also shows how busy committees were at different times.
This view shows a summary of the topic keywords associated with events during this negotiation, and
allows users to find events associated with each keyword.
This page offers a series of views for exploring the work of those involved in this process of negotiation, focusing on the hierarchical
relationship of proposals rather than on the sequence of events. Other tools presented here show the volume of work handled by each committee, or the number of events that each
individual played a leading roll in.
Monica McWilliams is Emeritus Professor in the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University, and has campaigned tirelessly for peace and human rights in both Northern Ireland and the wider world for more than four decades. As co-founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC), she was elected to the Multi-Party Talks in 1996 at a key juncture in the peace negotiations. The section of her archive digitized as part of this project focuses on the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement (1998-2003) and the process of implementation during Professor McWilliams's time as a Member of the Legislative Assembly (1998-2003).
The digitization of the Monica McWilliams Collection is a partnership with Queen's University. The physical archive is housed in the McClay Library, along with wider records of the NIWC and Professor McWilliams’s work with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. This collection was catalogued and digitized by Ruth Murray, Annabel Harris and Harriet Carter. The structure of the Collection is based on the categories used in Professor McWilliams's own filing system. Some reorganization has taken place to interweave loose papers and to ensure that records from each Committee are co-located for easier reference.
Cite as: Christopher McCrudden, Annabel Harris, Ruth Murray, Ian McBride and Nicholas P. S. Cole, Northern Ireland Mini-Models , Quill Project at Pembroke College (Oxford, 2024).