"The City is Yours": Desegregation and Sharing Space in Post-Conflict Belfast

Abstract: This study examines how borders are socially produced and deconstructed in “post-conflict” North Belfast. Twenty years after the signing of the historic Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, a peace model lauded for the resolution of conflicts worldwide, Belfast today remains a highly divided city with the existence of numerous segregation barriers, among them so-called peace walls, physically separating Protestant from Catholic neighbourhoods. Indicating a failure to achieve social accommodation, this thesis seeks to examine how people in North Belfast understand, negotiate, and experience space and borders around them. In particular, it illuminates the processes and agents involved in modifying and transforming borders, as well as the resistance engendered in doing so amidst considerable intra-community debate and competition over place identities and their attendant narratives. Placed firmly within the anthropological study of borders and space, it shows how borders and their regimes are socially constructed and should be understood as practices and imaginations rather than simply as inert objects which render individuals as passive “victims” of their urban environs. It furthermore seeks to challenge prevailing cognitive and analytical constructs of borders and border crossing. Based on ten weeks of fieldwork in Belfast by the author, this study employs extensive participant observation and semi-structured interviews.