Newspaper Op-Ed

Why it’s a negative peace while we remain divided

Co-existing and sharing society is not enough in the long-term

Brandon Hamber
3 min readMay 1, 2013

--

“Union” by Reciprocal of Phi Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Northern Ireland has made massive strides towards peace since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was signed 15 years ago.

The agreement is viewed globally as a positive model — particularly in the groundbreaking way that it guarantees nationality and identities, regardless of the status of Northern Ireland.

Politicians should be commended that, in spite of their different political aspirations, they have established the power-sharing institutions.

But in spite of this, those of us who study and practise conflict transformation would view the peace here as a negative peace. That is a context where political violence has decreased but the underlying issues that fuel conflict have not been addressed.

One of these issues is societal segregation. The signatories to the 1998 agreement recognised that societal integration was key to reconciliation, noting that “an essential aspect of the reconciliation process is the promotion of a culture of tolerance at every level of society, including initiatives to facilitate and encourage integrated education and mixed housing.” But only 7% of children attend integrated schools 15 years on and, in spite of some slight improvements in residential mixing, most people go home to largely single-identity communities.

On the whole, people lead separate social, educational, sporting, recreational and religious lives.

Clearly, the commitment in the agreement to integration has not been realised, suggesting that — drawing on the sentiment of the agreement — reconciliation here is incomplete.

However, as the agreement has unfolded, what has become apparent is that what reconciliation means to different parties is not clear.

The original commitment to promoting integration has also waned. Politicians’ inability to agree an overarching policy to promote integration is evidence of this.

One of the reasons why this policy has not been agreed is because there is no commonality on the vision of what society we are working towards.

--

--

Brandon Hamber

Hume O'Neill Professor of Peace at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Medium is my popular writing space. Academic publications at brandonhamber.com