Mentor Post #5

I met with Professor Wanis on Feb. 20, and updated him that I was switching to structured, focused case comparison. Luckily, it turns out that Professor Wanis used SFCC for his own dissertation, so he’s really quite familiar with it. We also discussed how I should do more than just the Good Friday Agreement, because SFCC is a comparative methodology. He suggested that I choose different negotiations within the Northern Ireland process, such as the Sunningdale Agreement in the 1970s. This essentially makes the project a within-case comparison, where the peace process as whole is the case and the different agreements themselves are observations within the case. This also gives my project high internal validity- by choosing the same conflict, I can control for a lot of the case-specific variables to peace processes. Peace processes are very complex and dependent on things that are specific to each conflict, which makes focusing on one conflict a more effective way to analyze peace processes.