1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace
The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998.
This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches.
While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.
Introduction
Laura McAtackney and Máirtín Ó Catháin
Overview of the Troubles
Máirtín Ó Catháin
PART 1: Debates and controversies
1. ‘Rigorous impartiality’? The UK Government, Amnesties and Northern Ireland Conflict Legacy 1998-2022
Thomas Leahy
2. The cutting edge of the IRA: the armed struggle North and South of the Border
Brian Hanley
3. Collusion
Mark McGovern
4. Getting beyond No: Ulster loyalist political thought during the Troubles
Connal Parr
5. Political Memoir-writing and Personal Narratives: Researching the Conflictual past in Northern Ireland
Stephen Hopkins
6. Gender and class in Progressive Loyalism
Sophie Long
7. Northern Ireland: still a place apart?
Aaron Edwards
PART 2: Environment and the everyday
8. ‘The writing on the wall’: the myths of Free Derry, 1968-72
Máirtín Ó Catháin
9. ‘Everything was concrete: the everyday impacts of planning and urban redevelopment policy before and during the Troubles
Adrian Grant
10. The Troubles, emigration to Britain and transnational memories of conflict
Fearghus Roulston Jack Crangle, Graham Dawson, Liam Harte and Barry Hazley
11. How economists have interpreted the Troubles
Graham Brownlow
12. Writing the intersections: representing gender and class in Troubles fiction
Ciara McAllister
13. Reconsidering children’s experiences of the conflict in Northern Ireland
Lucy Newby
PART 3: Events and personalities
14. ‘Fidel Castro in a mini-skirt’ or ‘St Joan of the Barricades’? Versions of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Sarah Campbell
15. The strategic transformation of Provisional Irish Republicanism, 1979-98
Jack Hepworth
16. John Hume and his ideas
Thomas Dolan
17. Catholic Bishops and Priests, Internationalism and the Conflict in Northern Ireland: The Links to Germany
Jan Freytag
18. Spattered Tunic: Trade Unions in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968-98
Emmet O’Connor
19. Women in Long Kesh/Maze prison: We Were there (2014), memory and visuality
Fionna Barber
20. The Politics of Gender in the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition
Robin Whitaker
PART 4: Strategies and aftermath
21. Dissident Irish Republicanism: Keeping the Flame Alive
Marisa McGlinchey
22. Policing and Peace in Northern Ireland: Change, Conflict and Cmmunity Confidence
Joanne Murphy
23. Everyday Architectures and Spaces of Territory and Division
David Coyles
24. Sinn Féin and the IRA Narrative
Agnès Maillot
25. Reconciliation and ‘Whataboutery’ in Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland
Cillian McGrattan
26. Beyond Simple Binaries? Reflecting on Immigrants’ Experiences in Northern Ireland
Philip McDermott
27. Politics, Homophobia and the Socio-Legal evolution of LGBTQ+ Communities in Northern Ireland
Marian Duggan
PART 5: Reflective practice
28. Where am I? Unsettling Encounters in Researching Memory, Subjectivity and Conflict Transformation After the Northern Irish Troubles
Graham Dawson
29. Photography and the Northern Irish Conflict: A Short History
Anthony Haughey
30. Meeting Place
Bryonie Reid
31. Curating the Troubles Legacy: ‘Art can Tread Were Words and Politics Often Can’t’
Kim Mawhinney
32. Journalism in Troubled Times
Malachi O’Doherty
33. Northern Protestants’ Irish Ghost Limb
Claire Mitchell
PART 6: Heritage and Memory
34. The Challenge of Change: Museum Practice Informed by and Informing the Peace Process
Elizabeth Crooke
35. The Evolution of Heritage and Memory in a Divided Society
Paul Mullan
36. Exhibiting the Troubles: How Museums Claim Space in the Landscape of Post-Conflict Societies
Kathryn McClurkin
37. Emblems of the Peace Process: Conflict-Related Artefacts in Northern Ireland’s Heritage Sector
Erin Hinson
38. Commemorating Conflict in the Paramilitary Museum
Katie Markham
39. Materializing Conflict and Peace: Presences and Absences from the Recent Past in the North of Ireland
Laura McAtackney
PART 7: Creative responses
40. Things Don’t Seem Right: TheAffective and Institutional Politics of Writing About the North of Ireland from the North of England
Caroline Magennis
41. From Trauma to Promise? The state of Northern Ireland in Post-Agreement Drama
Stephanie Lehner
42. Centering the Home in the Study of Conflict: Domestic Space, Memory and the Troubles
Eli Davies
43. Staging Ground: Temporality and Site-Specificity at Ebrington Barracks
Sarah Feinstein
44. Religious women and the Troubles: an oral history
Dianne Kirby
45. A Ghost Estate and an Empty Grave: the O’Dowd Murders and their Aftermath
Martin Doyle
Biography
Laura McAtackney is Professor in Archaeology at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Ireland, and Professor in Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She uses contemporary archaeological approaches to understand difficult recent pasts including the Northern Irish conflict and peace process, gendered institutions and colonial legacies. She is the author of An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze (2014).
Máirtín Ó Catháin is Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the University of Central Lancashire. He has also worked for the Workers’ Educational Association and Ulster People’s College in Northern Ireland in the past and has specific interests in local labour and social history, oral history, and everyday life approaches to the Northern Irish conflict and peace process.
