ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|98 pages
Debates and controversies
chapter 1|19 pages
‘Rigorous impartiality’?
chapter 5|11 pages
Political memoir-writing and personal narratives
part 2|85 pages
Environment and the everyday
chapter 9|17 pages
‘Everything was concrete’
part 3|88 pages
Protagonists and participants
chapter 17|11 pages
Catholic bishops and priests, internationalism, and the conflict in Northern Ireland
part 4|96 pages
Strategies and aftermath
chapter 22|14 pages
Policing and peace in Northern Ireland
chapter 26|13 pages
Beyond simple binaries?
part 5|73 pages
Reflective practice
chapter 28|11 pages
Where am I?
chapter 31|14 pages
Curating the Troubles legacy
part 6|82 pages
Heritage and memory
chapter 34|14 pages
The challenge of change
chapter 36|12 pages
Exhibiting the Troubles
chapter 37|13 pages
Emblems of the peace process
chapter 39|15 pages
Materialising conflict and peace
part 7|69 pages
Creative responses