‘… for peace comes dropping slow’

This article considers Northern Ireland’s history of conflict through a lens that emphasizes conciliation over conflict. It demonstrates how numerous state, social and economic groups actively attempted to avoid, rectify or oppose Northern Ireland’s conflict. In doing so, the article argues that long before (and after) the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was reached subtle changes at the societal level helped both restrain and later ameliorate the conflict there. This emphasis questions the utility of more (para)militarized histories of Northern Ireland’s Troubles by seeing the peace process as the growth of conciliation rather than the attenuation of violence. Applying this to what is widely regarded as the polarization of politics in the contemporary United States, the article highlights how the emphasis on violent events in the public mind can actively obscure a more consistent, if gradual, current flowing in a different direction.

Conclusion: “I Hope It Wasn’t All a Waste”

As we have seen throughout history, the road to a sustainable peace is a long and winding one, rife with potholes and perils. So, in a comparative sense, Northern Ireland deserves credit that the Good Friday Agreement, despite rewarding separateness over integration, has held for more than 20 years. Yet it seems there is a dangerous trajectory in contemporary Northern Ireland that has regional, global, and, most importantly, human implications for how we understand the transitions a society goes through in moving from conflict to a stable, enduring, and sustainable peace. More than two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland finds itself in a shallow, troubled sleep, and its future, moving more quickly each day, is trending in a darker and more dangerous direction. How it awakes from that troubled sleep will determine whether it is on the edge of a new beginning or a painfully familiar old precipice.

Constitutional Policy & Territorial Politics in the UK Vol 1

This is the first of a two-volume work which provides an authoritative account of devolution in the UK since the initial settlement under New Labour in 1997. This first volume meets the need for a comprehensive, UK-wide analysis of the formative years of devolution from the years 1997 to 2007, offering a rigorous and theoretically innovative re-examination of the period that traces territorial politics from initial settlements in Scotland and Wales and the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland to early maturity. The book reviews the trajectory and influencing factors of devolution and its subsequent impacts, using a novel framework to set a significant new agenda for thinking and research on devolution.

Navigating complexity and uncertainty after the Belfast–Good Friday Agreement : the role of societal trauma?

A central challenge of the Belfast–Good Friday Agreement is the radical contingency or uncertainty that underpins the current democratic legal order in Northern Ireland. It is a dimension of the Agreement that will come to the fore with growing demands for preparations and planning ahead of any referendum on the constitutional future of the region. Using a combination of perspectives from the literature on societal trauma and agonism, this article asks if we need to pay more attention to this affective dimension of the Belfast–Good Friday Agreement and the journey from outright antagonism to an agonism that envisages a society capable of addressing conflict while respecting the ‘other’s’ entitlement to hold a radically different position.

Banalising Evil?

2018 was the celebration year of the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, bringing power-sharing and much peace to Northern Ireland. Twenty years seem a fair distance to address the issue from a comical viewpoint. Lisa McGee's television show Derry Girls (2018) released in Channel 4, and recently in Netflix, seems to convey a nostalgic and caustic outlook at the 1990s during the last years of The Troubles and focuses on the lives of a gang of four Irish teenagers growing up in the setting of Catholic Derry. This chapter will interrogate the banalization of evil conveyed by McGee by tackling the representation of evil and violence in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.