Peter Emerson

Peter Emerson, the child of an English Catholic mum and Irish Protestant dad, was conceived in Belfast (as far as he recalls) but/and born in England.  So - Ne Temere and all that - he was raised a Catholic.  First in submarines, he sank to the rank of first lieutenant, but resigned to teach maths and physics in Kenya.  Next, Belfast in 1975, he was a community worker in Ardoyne and then an activist in the peace movement and CND.  “Are you ’this’ or ’that’?” they asked, in both conflicts, so he learnt Russian and got a job in Moscow. But first, in 1986, he helped John Robb's New Ireland Group run an experiment in consensus, with SF, the UDA - all but the DUP - using non-binary voting.  It worked.  Back in Belfast in ’91, we did another, with a guest from Sarajevo: Bosnia, too, was to suffer a binary conflict.  Does everyone  use binary voting?  He’s just been to China; it seems the answer is yes.

Go East, Old Man IV: A ballot where nobody votes no

| Readers 376

From a Dartmouth parade ground to a Belfast youth club, a Moscow kitchen table and a Tibetan lake, Peter Emerson traces the chance encounters that turned an ex-submariner into a lifelong critic of yes-or-no voting. He also asks what ancient Asia might teach us about deciding things together.

Go East, Old Man – Part II: Opting Out of Opting Out

| Readers 657

From an interrogation at the Russian border to an anti-war lecture in Moscow and a power cut in wartime Mykolaiv, Peter Emerson travels through Putin’s Russia and into Ukraine. Along the way he asks why binary referendums, the “matryoshka” votes of Crimea, Bosnia and the Donbas, so often end in bloodshed, and what that means for Northern Ireland’s border poll.

Go East, Old Man – Part I: Tīngbudǒng! Cycling Through Village China

| Readers 575

At 82, on a folding Brompton, Peter Emerson cycles through rural Yúnnán and Guǎngxī to see how Chinese villages make decisions. There’s báijiǔ with farmers, a granny’s 70th birthday lunch, and a stop short of Tibet. He finds that China, like almost everyone else, swears by majority rule, though it held a three-option vote back in 1197.