New Diplomacy: The UK and Ireland in a Changing World (NEWDIP)

Ireland and the UK share a complex and contested history. For nearly 50-years their bilateral relationship was embedded within a larger European project of political and economic integration which contributed substantially to a normalising of relationships. At the same time, the two governments worked together with local political parties and other actors in Northern Ireland to construct a durable framework for agreed governance and peace-building to resolve the violent conflict in Northern Ireland.

The 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement created just such a framework. The UK's withdrawal from the EU entails substantial changes to that bilateral relationship in both political and economic aspects. It also pulls at the threads of the carefully woven constitutional settlement in Northern Ireland.

The goal of the NEWDIP project is to bring together early career and established scholars, as well as policy practitioners, to look at the most critical foreign policy, security and defence aspects of this bilateral relationship as the UK and Ireland embark on quite different national journeys. How will Ireland and the UK define and pursue their respective national foreign policies, as well as their bilateral cooperation, post-Brexit?

The NEWDIP project will look at three inter-related set of foreign policy, security and defence relationships.

- How can/should the UK and Ireland manage and develop their bilateral diplomatic and defence relationship? What are the shared/distinct security interests and what modes of bilateral cooperation exist to manage these?

- Outside of the bilateral relationship, how does the UK's withdrawal from the European Union change the respective foreign, security and defence policies of the UK and Ireland? What opportunities and constraints present themselves in this new situation and how might bilateral cooperation reinforce opportunities and minimise constraints?

- As the European Union expands and develops its own foreign, security and defence policy profile, how does this impact the bilateral relationship? Also, how might the bilateral relationship effect Ireland's engagement with its EU partners and the UK's bilateral relationship with the European Union as a third country?

Our research - which will actively engage graduate students, scholars and practitioners - is designed to be of practical use and application. Through the creation of this new research network we will endeavour to build and strengthen professional relationships, contribute to wider policy debates and conversations and to build an interdisciplinary research team which can design, propose and successfully execute novel research projects addressing the research questions above.

NEWDIP will be constructed from strong foundations. The European Foreign Policy Unit (EFPU) of LSE acts as a focus for research on issues related to attempts to create a collective European foreign policy and, more recently, to the consequences of Brexit on matters of foreign affairs. The UCD Institute for British Irish Studies (IBIS) has generated research from, and public policy engagement with, an inclusive mix of academics, politicians, public servants, NGOs, civil society groups and citizens on aspects of the evolving British-Irish relationship. It is now focussing on challenges to British-Irish relations stemming from Brexit.

These two institutions have a specific expertise that will sustain a public debate with a variety of stakeholders on the challenges of contemporary foreign affairs and British-Irish relations. While webinars will be addressed to students and public policy events to policy makers, our proposed research will engage the academic communities in Ireland and the UK, as well as policy-makers, thus building a broad interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholders' network.

The debates generated by NEWDIP will act as a scoping exercise to first explore and then exploit joint research opportunities, including EU funds via Horizon Europe.