Teens and territory in 'post-conflict' Belfast: If walls could talk

By Madeleine Leonard

This book provides a thought provoking and comprehensive account of teenagers’ perceptions and experiences of the physical and symbolic divisions that exist in ‘post conflict’ Belfast. By examining the micro-geographies of young people from segregated areas and drawing attention to the social practices, discourses and networks that directly or indirectly shape how teenagers make sense of and negotiate life in Belfast, the book provides a timely response to the neglect of the experiences of young people growing up in ‘post conflict’ societies. The voices of these young people need to be heard alongside the often partial accounts of young people who live in communities that have benefitted from the peace process. While both are part of the ‘post conflict’ generation how this plays out in the daily practices and experiences of those who continue to reside in segregated communities needs to be articulated and understood before Belfast can truly claim its ‘post-conflict’ status.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526120441

Madeleine Leonard

Madeleine Leonard is Professor in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast

Book preview

1

Place and identity

There is always a threat of returning to the past of violence, hatred and depression which still engulf the city. Belfast I believe will never escape its history which is known worldwide. There is still a threat when someone of a Catholic origin enters an area of Protestant majority. That person, I think even if they act confident, are afraid and uneasy because of the reputation of what can happen because of the past. This can happen in many different versions, whether it be Protestant or Catholic. (Catholic girl)

Northern Ireland is regarded as one of the most successful ‘post conflict’ societies in the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in its capital city, Belfast. The city, once blighted by derelict, bombed-out buildings, now projects a new, outward-looking presence. New, flagship developments abound in the city centre, making it a more aesthetically pleasing place than it was during the period of the conflict. This investment, based on the promotion of economic liberalisation and consumption, aims to create the conditions for a durable and sustainable peace. It aims to promote a neutral, apolitical city based on a neo-liberal model of peace building and reconstruction (Richmond, 2011; Paris, 2004). Undoubtedly, there have been a number of changes for the better. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ushered in a new era of power sharing and set in motion a period of sustained and highly significant reduction in fatalities, shootings, bombings and other incidents of conflict. However, as Lee (2013: 524) points out, Belfast remains ‘no ethnic melting pot. It might aspire to, and be in the process of becoming a city that is more liberal, pluralistic and cosmopolitan, but it still consists largely of two embittered dominant groups.’

One has only to move a short distance from the city centre to see the continuing polarisation of the two main communities. Many Catholics and Protestants continue to live in adjacent, segregated communities, often characterised by poverty, unemployment and general deprivation, where the benefits of the peace process have been limited. The reimaging of Belfast as a ‘post conflict’ city tends to gloss over these persistent divisions. These people’s voices are often absent from the discourses presenting Belfast as a pluralistic, cosmopolitan, modern and neutral city. Their perceptions and experiences of ‘post conflict’ Belfast clash with the more popular dominant discourses and hence often receive little local, national or international coverage. The purpose of this book is to visit some of these neglected communities and articulate the voices, perceptions and experiences of the young people who live and grow up in them.

‘If walls could talk’ is a popular metaphor for illuminating the often hidden aspects of ‘what happens within’, when walls surround rooms and buildings, creating boundaries between the private and the public. Its usage here relates to walls that act as frontier markers between working-class Catholic and Protestant communities. Through the discourses of young people who inhabit these areas, the book illuminates what goes on within and between these walls. These young people’s voices need to be heard alongside the more favourable accounts of young people who live in communities that have benefited from the peace process. While both groups are part of the ‘post conflict’ generation, how this plays out in daily practices and experiences needs to be articulated and understood before Belfast can truly claim its ‘post conflict’ status.

Despite Northern Ireland’s new status as one of the most successful examples of the resolution of what was once seen as an intractable conflict, the peace walls which separate Protestant and Catholic areas remain in place, and are one of the most enduring and visible legacies of the conflict. However, despite their longevity, these walls are not recorded on any official maps. Sporadic rioting also continues to flare up, particularly around parades, demonstrating the fragility rather than the durability of the peace process. The involvement of young people in these riots is particularly perplexing, given that this group has grown up against a backdrop of paramilitary ceasefires, the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing political framework. The overall purpose of this book is to explore these contradictions by presenting young people’s perceptions and experiences of the physical and symbolic divisions that exist in ‘post conflict’ Belfast and the ways in which they (re)produce, negotiate or challenge them in their everyday lives. The book examines the micro-geographies of young people and draws attention to the social practices, discourses and networks that directly or indirectly (re)shape how they make sense of and negotiate life in Belfast.¹

This involves recognition that space and place are intimately connected, that neither can exist without the other (Agnew, 2011). Space and place have multiple and often contradictory meanings. Space is a more abstract concept than place. It is unlimited, everywhere, unending and all encompassing. Place is the physical embodiment of space but refers to much more than mere physical landscapes. While place is often bounded and specific to a location, its distinctiveness relates to the way people interact within emplaced spaces to create and experience a sense of belonging. People give and invest meaning to place. However, while we acknowledge the importance of people in place, the physical landscape in which everyday life occurs is much more than a mere backdrop. The physicality of place is an important interpretive lens through which everyday life is accomplished. Landscapes themselves play a core role in constructing the fabric of social life. Place is the ‘cause’ as well as the ‘outcome’ of social action (Tickmayer, 2000). It is an agentic player in the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday life. In calling for an ‘emplaced sociology’, Gieryn (2000) appeals to sociology to make ‘space for place’. This involves uncovering the processes whereby place acts as a catalyst for everyday action. It involves recognition that the spatial and the social are inextricably intertwined (Kidder, 2009).

Agnew challenges the notion of an increasingly ‘placeless’ global world where ever-increasingly sophisticated technologies create virtual spaces and, in the process, render actual places irrelevant. This view is shared by Withers (2009: 639), who argues that ‘in the face of globalisation, questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever’. Agnew’s typology of place outlines three recurring features intimately connecting space to place: place as a particular ‘location’, place as a ‘locale’ where everyday life is practised and a ‘sense of place’ referring to how people identify with place and develop a strong sense of belonging. All three definitions are prevalent in this research, reflecting Agnew’s (1987: 28) observation that ‘a key tenet is that the local social worlds of place (locale) cannot be understood apart from the objective macro-order of that location and the subjective territorial identity of sense of place’. Location refers to the broader structural framework in which local social worlds are constituted. It involves paying attention to the wider historical, economic, political and social processes which impact on physical geographical locations. How a location comes into existence paves the way for Agnew’s second definition, that of ‘locale’. For Agnew, ‘locale’ refers to the geographical settings within which everyday social interactions occur. It is within the locale that social relations are structured, managed and negotiated. It is within the locale that everyday knowledge is acquired and transmitted. Locales are dynamic rather than static, referring simultaneously to the rootedness of attitudes and behaviour and the ongoing tensions and social transformations that occur at the level of the everyday. Agnew’s third definition, ‘sense of place’, takes this analysis a step further by emphasising how places are experienced and understood by their inhabitants. His overall conception of place provides a useful framework for bringing together location with the lived realities of people who occupy place.

Therefore, while places are made up of spaces, more importantly, they are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through social relationships and social practices. Spaces are little more than ‘empty abstractions’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 12), while places are ‘drenched in cultural meaning’ (Preston, 2003: 74). Places are experienced, remembered, understood and imagined by the people who occupy them (Soja, 1999). Places are lived spaces and they play a core role in shaping identities and relationships. They are fundamentally embedded in identity: so much so, that Casey (2001: 684) suggests that ‘there is no place without self and no self without place’. Place matters to people. It functions as the background raw material for the creative production of identity (Cresswell, 2004). It becomes a backdrop to the shaping of local, regional and national identities. While identities are multiple and dynamic, nonetheless, they emerge within and from place and impact on the past, present and future (Casey, 1993). Paying attention to the place-rooted dimension of identity construction is a core underlying feature of this book’s framework. Addressing this neglect provides a necessary challenge to accounts which emphasise global aspects of identity while ignoring their place-rooted dimensions.

Hence, while place has a physical reality, it also embodies social and symbolic meaning and becomes the location within which socio-political relationships and actions are structured, contested and reworked. In understanding how people perceive and manage everyday life in divided cities, generation is prioritised as an important structural variable, influencing socio-spatial relationships and practices. Until recently, generation has been largely neglected in the adult-focused research on how young people’s perceptions of space and place impact on daily life and spatial practices. However, ignoring young people’s ways of seeing is likely to result in incomplete accounts of daily life in divided cities. Hence, a core purpose of this book is to bring young people’s perspectives into understandings of socio-spatial knowledge and experiences of divided landscapes. Space is likely to be produced, experienced and managed in a multitude of different ways and brings into play different socio-spatial strategies, depending on the wider positioning of daily users of space. How do young people develop spatial literacy? How do their localised, everyday micro-geographies differ from those of adults? Can these differences shed light on the salience or disruption of wider political processes around territory and boundaries? These are the kinds of questions which this book sets out to confront. As Harvey (1996: 261) reminds us, ‘place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct’.

The focus of this book is on how everyday life is accomplished by young people living in divided cities, using Belfast as a case study. As Webber (1964: 147) acknowledges, ‘it is interaction, not place that is the essence of the city and of city life’. However, the phrase ‘everyday life’ is notoriously difficult to define. At one level, it is used to mean everything and anything, making it a woolly, rather useless concept. Most of those who use the term ‘are often reluctant to explain exactly what it means’ (Felski, 2000: 77). While the concept of daily life has a long history dating back to ancient Greece, Lefebvre (1991) argues that it is a specific modern phenomenon, its distinctiveness emerging with the impact of industrialisation and capitalism shaping everyday life in previously unrelated ways. The flood of people migrating into newly emerging cities, brought together under new conditions of modernity, has rendered everyday life into a series of mundane and repetitive acts. Everyday life practices are recurring practices: they occur daily, weekly, monthly, yearly (Lefebvre, 2008). As Felski (2000: 84) argues, ‘repetition is one of the ways we organise the world, make sense of our environment, and stave off the threat of chaos. It is a key factor in the gradual formation of identity as a social and intersubjective process. Quite simply, we become who we are through acts of repetition.’ These acts of repetition may, at times, mean holding on to a threatened, traditional way of life. At the same time, repetition coexists with resistance and transformation.

Everyday life is usually localised in place (Sztompa, 2008: 31). Everyday life occurs at certain locations: at home, in the street, community and city centre. It also incorporates a temporal dimension. This not only refers to the length of time attached to encounters and events but is additionally shaped by location of time, in terms of day or night, or different times of the year. Hence, everyday life is spatial, temporal and contextual. Everyday life is also an embodied accomplishment. It actively engages our bodies. Our bodies move through spaces and places and, through interacting with other bodies, we construct, co-construct, deconstruct and reconstruct taken-for-granted identities. In each context we may behave differently and interact differently. But more importantly, for the most part, our daily accomplishment of everyday life involves habits and routines of which we may not always be reflectively aware. We employ common-sense assumptions and routines to structure and impose order on our everyday lives. As Felski (2000: 91–2) points out, ‘the contemporary city may constitute a chaotic labyrinth of infinite possibilities, yet in our daily travels we often choose to carve out a familiar path, managing space and time by tracing out the same route over and over again’. These habits and routines reflect not just practices but attitudes as well. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) amply illustrates this. The habitus refers to taken-for-granted ways of thinking about and acting upon the social world. According to Bourdieu (1987), people habitually reproduce the structures of everyday life. In other words, their past history, their culture and their past experiences impact on their current state of mind and behaviour.

This does not mean that behaviour is therefore rendered as predictable. Since people are agents, alternative choices are always possible. However, agency is practised within the field of structurally provided possibilities and therefore, to some extent, subsequent choices are likely to reproduce existing structures. In this vein, Massey (1994: 155–6) argues that the landscapes of everyday life involve a mixture of macro and micro social relationships, with the fusion-producing effects that are particular to specific localities. As Epstein and Johnson (1998: 116) point out, ‘active work always occurs under socially given conditions which include structures of power and social relations, institutional constraints and possibilities but also available cultural repertories’. This relationship can be both complementary and antagonistic. Daily life always includes practices that are subversive or demonstrate resistance (de Certeau, 1984). Reay (2000: 433) suggests that Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus can be viewed as ‘potentially generating a wide repertoire of possible actions, simultaneously enabling the individual to draw on transformative and constraining courses of action’.

These perspectives are applied to an understanding of young people’s perceptions and experiences of growing up in Belfast. Historically, the spatial perceptions and experiences of children and young people have received scant attention from geographers, architects and political and social scientists. This is particularly due to the misconception that young people have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, federations and constructions of territories and boundaries. Yet clearly, young people have always been actively part of ethno-territorial, regional and national movements, whether as icons for struggles, as active participants or as future adults who need to be effectively socialised into endorsing adult beliefs about constructions of sameness and difference around which many divided cities are shaped. The traditional location of young people as non-political is itself a political act. Where the focus does extend to include young people, it is often through the triple lens of children as victims, perpetuators or transformers of conflict. Children’s location as victims or perpetuators of political violence and their role as future citizens in disputed places have valuable political currency. In divided cities, children are born into pre-existing conflicts instigated and perpetuated by antagonisms between former generations. Children’s positioning as victims of pre-existing conflicts often finds expression in the rationale for peace, in many divided societies, for the sake of the children or the next generation. It is also reflected in the location of children in divided societies as having ‘lost’, ‘stolen’ or ‘abnormal’ childhoods. Cheney (2005), for example, points out that war becomes a space where contradictory notions of childhood are strategically utilised by a variety of government and aid agencies to end war and rehabilitate children into a post-conflict society. Children are often portrayed as the passive victims of adult conflicts, and their own experiences, perceptions and active participation in conflict activities is relatively muted. This also depends on one’s working definition of political conflict. There has been greater international focus on children as victims in war zones, while less attention has been paid to relatively low-key, recurring acts of violence over a prolonged period and their impact on children living in chronically divided societies. During the Northern Ireland conflict the state took on a management role which aimed at restricting the impact of the conflict to an acceptable level of violence. One could argue that this management role now transfers to the current situation, where the goal is an acceptable level of peace, which involves largely ignoring places that fall short of maintaining this objective.

Some young people may internalise the prejudices of previous generations and actively engage in conduct which perpetuates hostile relationships: children’s minds ‘often become the terrain for adult battles’ (Stephens, 1995: vii). Children may feel obligated to the previous generation to continue a struggle to right the perceived wrongs of the past, to hold on to and defend previous gains or to make new demands; they may engage in action which prolongs animosity between competing groups with differing claims to scarce resources. Studies from other conflict cities, such as Nicosia, Mostar, Beirut and Jerusalem, illustrate how young people sometimes feel duty bound either to forget or to remember the past in order to ensure that if the injustices of the past cannot be rectified for their parents they may be rectified through the actions of future generations, or that the gains of the past can be consolidated and defended in the present through the actions of new generations. In relation to Northern Ireland, the present research asks: How do the manifestations of traditional rivalry impact on the physical and symbolic territories and boundaries that young people subsequently occupy? How do young people manage and resist such divisions? Within these spaces, do young people make distinctions between place and territory, and how do their perceptions influence their spatial practices?

These questions acknowledge that memories are not transmitted passively from one generation to another. At each telling and retelling of a group’s history, the possibility always exists for not mere acceptance but contestation and negotiation. Young people do not passively internalise adult discourses. If we accept that young people, like adults, are active agents, then they too have the capacity to accept, reject or modify the dominant messages that they receive (Prout and James, 1990). Each successive generation creates new opportunities to transcend the past and actively contributes to transforming and moving beyond the uneasy relationships of the past. Young people have the potential to actively contribute to conflict-transformation processes, and the accomplishment of such transformations is dependent on their acceptance by new generations. However, young people often play a marginal role in peace processes. For example, in McCabe and Bourke’s (2002) research, young people stated that they felt excluded from Northern Ireland’s peace process and felt that they were considered as onlookers rather than as participants in conflict resolution. Hence, this research examines young people’s three-fold role as victims, perpetuators and transformers of conflict, and the connections between the three.

To understand young people’s daily lives, we need to examine the wider historical, political and cultural processes within which those lives are embedded. We also need to examine adult–child relations and how these reflect historically durable generational relationships based on power and processes of inclusion and exclusion. However, while age is a key variable here, I do not want to imply that young people experience divided cities in universal ways. Rather, young people’s experiences are likely to be internally differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity, religion and location, each of these factors impacting singly or multiply to create a variety of socio-spatial meanings, behaviours and practices. Young people are likely to carry around in their heads a cocktail of cultural and subcultural knowledge which shapes and informs their everyday lives. While these dispositions are durable, they are also transformable. While childhoods are often made by adults for the children within their societies, nonetheless, young people have a capacity for agency and resistance (Philo, 2003: 107). Hence, childhood, like the habitus, is in a constant state of becoming. Each new generation has the capacity to practise what Hays (1994: 64) refers to as ‘structurally reproductive agency’. In her view, this ‘is made possible under particular historical circumstances – when portions of what were once deeper social structures become particularly malleable and provide occasion for collective refashioning’. Hence, throughout this book, how young people growing up in the ‘post conflict’ stage of Northern Ireland rework adult discourses, and the extent to which local and city-centre space, particularly the transformation of the city centre into a neutral consumption space, impacts on their spatial attitudes and behaviour are examined.

While there has been scant academic focus on young people’s micro-geographies, existing research suggests that young people are likely to experience everyday life in cities in ways that differ from the experience of adults. A small body of research focuses on the importance of streets, indoor shopping centres and vacant spaces in immediate localities as key places where teenagers hang out and perform varying identities (Percy-Smith and Matthews, 2001; Wooley et al., 1999; Matthews et al., 1998). Often, young people lack the resources to move outside local areas and thus find it more difficult, as compared to adults, to establish more geographically spread social networks. Instead, they often build up attachments to local areas based on peer-group friendships and kinship ties which induce feelings of familiarity and safety and turn local spaces into intimate locations. Within these spaces, young people create their own micro-geographies, particularly in terms of trying to gain spatial autonomy from adult surveillance and control. ‘It is in the course of such informal interaction, away from parents and teachers, that significant aspects of young people’s personal and social identities are affirmed, contested, rehearsed and reworked’ (Hall et al., 1999: 506). Young people often use or colonise space in ways not anticipated by adults, turning vacant and derelict places into exciting venues for meeting up away from the adult gaze, turning shopping centres from places of consumption into places where teenage groupings can be formed and maintained and turning street corners into territorial markers of group identity. In forming competing identities, young people often reappropriate global teen culture in local ways, using clothing, jewellery, sporting preferences and so on as markers of inclusion and exclusion. This research examines whether these processes operate along different lines in politically divided cities and whether group affiliation takes on wider, politically motivated territorial dimensions.

Chapter 2 attends to the methodology employed in the research. The chapter outlines the mixed-methods approach used throughout the data-collection phase, which was aimed at gathering visual and narrative data in ways that would stimulate and engage the young people who took part in the study. The research draws on ‘the new sociology of