Abstract
Nearly a quarter of a century after the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, Northern Ireland (NI) remains the poster child for those studying and embarking on societal transitions from conflict to peace. However, those who live in the region would be hard-pressed to identify the cyclical absence of government, ongoing deprivation, and an increasing rise in sectarian, racial, and gender-based violence with a successful peace transition. Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday takes a critical approach to the liberal peace-building narrative, providing a multi-faceted but connected understanding of contemporary Northern Irish society twenty-three years later.
While the book's number of authors and variety of topics ensure no one methodological or theoretical position is taken, its wider aim of a critique of the peace process and the hyperbolic narratives surrounding it comes from the identification of three major shortcomings of the process. Firstly, the hard separation of war-time and peace-time has led to failure to deal with the lasting traumas of the conflict. Secondly, traditional conceptions of conflict, merely concerning the state and its opponents, belie the multiple other forms of violence endemic in Northern Irish society which continue post-agreement. Thirdly, the consociational governmental system, rather than integrating communities, has worked to exacerbate ethno-sectarian identification.
The four authors build this larger critique via a historical background chapter followed by six chapters focusing individually on the most pressing and enduring issues facing NI today. Chapter Two argues that instead of creating a social space for reconciliation, attempts to deal with the legacy of the Troubles have focused more on assigning culpability and blame, due to the lack of a clear victor of the conflict meaning the past remains politicised. Of specific interest is the authors’ scepticism of the worth of a truth commission in NI for the same reasons. The following chapter deals with the status of conflict-related prisoners, noting that after decommissioning little was done to reintegrate former prisoners into society, with a specific critique of the current employment vetting system.
Chapter Four links us to the book's subheading of lost futures and new horizons through its analysis of contemporary television and film in NI, drawing on the work of Mark Fisher. The authors’ understanding of a range of media, from the 2008 Bobby Sand's biopic Hunger to the immensely popular comedy Derry Girls, reveals an arts landscape struggling to deal with the troubled past while also lamenting the loss of alternative futures which, instead of the beleaguered reality evident in the rest of the book, could have provided a meaningful and progressive peace. This lamentation runs throughout the book.
Following this, the book synthesises a mass of survey data collected over the past two decades to explore identity categories in NI, especially focusing on those who do not identify with the two traditionally dominant communities. While the exploration of the rising number of ‘those who are both, neither, other, and next’ is pertinent, the minimal inclusions of how traditional identities relate with class, gender, and sexual-orientation show the limitations of the quantitative data available. However, some reflection is made on the use of quantitative analysis in a region with notoriously ambiguous and complex identity formations (p. 191).
Chapter Six argues that the commitments made to women in the Agreement remain purely aspirational. It appeals to the relatively low levels of female political representatives and compares this to their relatively high representation at grassroot political levels. It then moves on to document the rising levels of violence against women in NI, which is central to the authors critique of the “peace” process. It then documents the ongoing fight for women's bodily autonomy, which has been one of the most difficult in the Western world.
The penultimate chapter attempts to expel the myths that the Troubles affected everyone equally and that the peace process has brought prosperity to NI. It provides evidence that those areas affected mostly by violence also experienced the highest levels of poverty. It goes on to argue that any prosperity brought by the peace process benefited middle class areas unaffected by the conflict, with working class areas experiencing similar or increasing poverty since. This phenomenon is attributed in large part to the neoliberal construction of the peace process, which allowed more neoliberal reforms to be implemented under the Blair government in the form of the Strategic Investment Board, and intensified by the coalition government culminating in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 in which both the DUP and Sinn Féin were, eventually, complicit.
The final chapter brings us up to 2021, arguing that both Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic have exacerbated the sectarian, class, and gendered violence dealt with in the preceding chapters. The depressing conclusion (or “no conclusion” as entitled by the authors) to the book, invoking persistent teenage kneecappings; paramilitary flags above playgrounds; and high separating walls of barbed wire, may be critiqued by some for its pessimism. However, events in the mere half-year since the book's publication have corroborated this position. Bus burnings opposing the trade border in the Irish sea have marked rising street violence, and NI was shamefully named as having the highest domestic-violence murder rate in Europe (Barnes, 2021). The book does however point to some grassroots movements like the socialist People Before Profit and the movement for women's bodily autonomy (to this should have been added the strong LGBTQ+ movement in NI) as possible sites of rupture to the dreary present. To paraphrase the inspiration of the book's subheading, Mark Fisher, the dire situation apparent in NI today ‘means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect’ (2009: 80).
This book must be the new touchstone for anyone wishing to understand the realities of NI today outside of mere party politics. It deals critically with multiple aspects of Northern Irish society and synthesises these individually complex topics into a critique of the affects of liberal peace building strategies on NI. This is an invaluable contribution to the sociology of deeply divided societies.
