Next up in our postgraduate bursary prize winner blog series is Amanda Hall (St Andrew’s University) on her field work this summer in Northern Ireland.

As anyone following public debate about Brexit is aware, it is difficult to know Northern Ireland without the opportunity to spend time there. While my own research considers the inter-referendum period from 1998 to 2016, the opportunity to spend time ‘on the ground’ – supported by a bursary from the British Association of Irish Studies – has quickly proven invaluable to my understanding of my research and its place in present-day conversations.

I am interested in the period between the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the Brexit Referendum for what it can tell us about ‘peace’ in Northern Ireland – something that, twenty years later, seems to be taken for granted in many circles and yet seems increasingly fragile with every news cycle. This is particularly obvious in the ‘culture war’ that has risen to the forefront in the last two decades, as the shift from militarised violence to more low-level everyday sectarianism makes everything from children attending school to the naming of a bus stop a point of contention. To understand why this has happened, and the particular role of the community and voluntary sector in working against this shift, it was critical that those involved were able to have their voices heard in this project – conversations that were able to take place because of this funding award.

Funding from the British Association of Irish Studies was used to support fieldwork in Northern Ireland carried out over June and July 2018, including interviews with current stake-holders and archival work situating the period of inquiry in the broader historical context. These semi-structured interviews with members of civil society organisations and statutory bodies across the region proved to be valuable conversations about the shifting nature of ‘peace’, conflict, and division in Northern Ireland, and how each changed over the relative quiet of the inter-referendum years. This change was particularly evident in the shift away from the largely-shared goal of ending paramilitary violence and achieving decommissioning to a more fractured view of what the future of the region should hold. These interviews focused on how grassroots/community sector organisations have impacted life, particularly in periods where devolved government has not functioned, and heard from those involved in community-based programmes under the broad heading of ‘Good Relations’ that, despite progress, there remains considerable work to be done in the future.

This considerable work to be done raises questions about the quality of peace in Northern Ireland, and the future of the region in the post-Brexit landscape. By looking at the ‘inter-referendum’ period – a period of relative quiet, in which the ‘peace’ established by the Good Friday Agreement was tested politically and socially but did not collapse – it is possible to investigate how society has gone from general acceptance of and support for the peace process to the stalemate seen two decades later. This research augments traditional discourse on the peace process in Northern Ireland, looking beyond the Good Friday Agreement toward the community sector and the role of grassroots organisations and initiatives in attempting to build ‘positive’ peace in the region since 1998. Scholarship to date has largely considered peace and its aspects in terms of topical ‘silos’, including a precipitous drop in research about peace in the region since the end of the Troubles. My research challenges the idea that the issue of peace in Northern Ireland was settled with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, instead positing that the Agreement was only the beginning of what was to be a generational process. What’s more, this process has seemingly stopped at the stage of the enduring ‘culture war’, with two main identity groups that seem to have no middle ground.

The fieldwork supported by the British Association of Irish Studies is essential to the success of this project. My PhD thesis argues that it is these stakeholders – more than elected officials – who impact on the everyday experiences of the 1.8 million people in Northern Ireland and the stability of the region, making speaking to them and observing their impact in Northern Ireland vital to the strength of these claims. While Brexit brings considerable uncertainty for the future, the years being investigated in this work provide a valuable case study into what can, and has, worked in Northern Ireland – lessons that would be impossible to learn without access to first-hand accounts, such as those documented during fieldwork this summer. Now having returned to St Andrews and working through transcriptions and archival notes, I am continually surprised with how much information I gathered in this short trip, and look forward to incorporating this fieldwork into the bulk of my PhD as I write up in this academic year.