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Those who hope to ameliorate situations of collective violence often aim to get the various participants and parties in a conflict to come to see one another as more similar than different. If only Israelis would spend more time with Palestinians, Georgians with Russians, Serbs with Croats and so on, the conflicts would abate because each side would understand more about the other. Adrian Millar's Socio-Ideological Fantasy and the Northern Ireland Conflict questions this assumption of minimizing conflict through encounter by suggesting that the source of the conflict may have far more to do with the ways a given community or collectivity sees itself than it has to do with how it sees the other. Millar offers a new and refreshing take on the Northern Ireland conflict specifically, and collective conflicts more generally, through the application of Lacanian psychodynamic theory.
In contrast to more traditional approaches to conflict resolution, Millar suggests that often ‘… getting the subject to change his/her perception of the other is not the way to succeed’ (p. 32). Rather, he suggests that the subject perceives the other in particular ways as part of a dynamic process of psychological defences, namely, those of projection and splitting, by which a subject responds to a sense of vulnerability, or threat, or (in Lacanian terms) lack by constructing a mirroring other. It is into this mirroring other that the self projects unwanted traits, thereby creating a new, unified subjectivity. The new self is most fully realized in the ‘not self’; the I is best understood in the terms of ‘not-I’. However, the recognition of the distinction between self and other is also the basis of an imaginary relationship within the subject. Millar suggests that this imaginary relationship always involves violence as the conflicted, complicated, insecure self fantasises that the other he encounters is whole, complete and secure. Millar asserts that, for Lacan, conflict is never about compet