Belfast, Segregation, Violence and the City, Shirlow P., Murtagh B. (2006)
Shirlow P., Murtagh B. (2006), Belfast, Segregation, Violence and the City, Pluto Press, London, Dublin, p.202
p.2
“Belfast is far from be the post-conflictual city that is dreamed of by planners, investors and wearied British and Irish politician”
p.15
“The ever-present conflict within Northern Ireland is not based upon religion but rather religion acts as a boundary marker with regard to competing aspirations regarding forms of Britishness and Irshness. As Jenkin concludes: ‘Although religion has a place in the repertoire of conflict in Northern Ireland, it is apparent that, for the majority of participants, the situation is seen to be primarily concerned with matters of politics and nationalism, not religious issues’ (1986:16). The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland remains as the key, symbolically defined feature of cultural and political discord (Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999; Wilson and Donnan, 1998). The constitutional border is replicated within cities, towns and villages throughout Northern Ireland. Conflict and its reproduction, at the micro level, are linked to the symbolisation of a constitutionally divided island.”
“In Belfast, unlike most divided cities in the European Union, the most acute and perceived spatial divisions are not simply those of class or race but those of national identity”
p.16
“The issue that affects both communities is not merely that the border exist but that the survival of the border is challenged”
p.17
“Segregation has had the effect, via spatial bordering, of creating containers within which many resident have, in the main, come to accept a unidimensional cultural and political definition”
p.18
“Segregated communities are place that have been engineered, fabricated and managed by political entrepreneur seeking to mobilise political discourse through territorial control.
“Space matters because it mediates the experiences of people in places, and further, it shapes the structure of opportunity set available to then” Heikkila 2001: 260”
p.22
“Even though [bien que] contemporary political violence can be use to justify the perpetuation of segregation it is clear that violence is one of several factors that account for this social and cultural practices”
p.24
“The key principle of crisis management has been to imagine that abnormal problems can solved via normal policy-making strategies”
p.25
“The construction of sectarianised affiliation casts those who do not accept cultural affiliation and repetitive ethno-sectarian discourses as both deviant and Treacherous. As the former MP Gerry Fitt used to say, ‘if you stand in the middle of the road you will get knocked down’. Our work indicates that the implied deterritorialisation need to shift Northern Irish society towards more agreed and agreeable forms of political ownership and consensus-building remains distant and at present geographically rootless.”
p.26
“Does it [the ‘other city’] really represent a new spatially differentiated class with distinctive interests shaped by material pursuits and not simply atavistic sectarian claims?”
- the other city: new suburban developments, with their gated qualities
p.28-29
“Accepting the victimhood, especially publicly, of the ‘other’ community is considered politically inappropriate within the context of ethno-sectarian opposition, as it would emasculate ideological genuineness and encourage a process of accepting responsibility for violent acts. Such a political shift would incapacitate the legitimacy of political ‘resistance’”
p.29
“It is important stress that the decrease in politically motivated violence over the past decade has been accompanied by an intensified process of claiming and ‘owning’ victimhood”
“Recognising that many people involved in ethno-sectarian and violent acts experience disproportionately high rates of fear and exposure to risk as rarely denoted as a motivating factor for the perpetuation of inter-community discord”
p.32
“Institutional approaches are guided by the supposition that conflict has been fuelled by inequality and political exclusion, and that the creation of new and inclusive governance structures will transform the nature and meaning of political hostility”
“ It is also maintained that division can be healed [guéri] through the adoption of new power relationships that followed the Maastrich Treaty and the decline on the centrality of sovereignty within the definition of nationhood”
p.34
“It [consociationalism] assume that identities are primordial and exclusive rather than malleable and relational: high fences [barrière] in other words make good neighbours! A fundamental condition of consociationalism is an overarching allegiance to the shared polity which counteracts these centrifugal forces (Wilford and Wilson, 2001:6)”
p.35
“There has been no post-nationalist turn that has led to a decline in the link between national identity and electoral outcomes”
p.46
“For the DUP political culture is tied to an unswerving commitment to an ethnically defined conception of territorial sovereignty”
p.51
“A further limitation is the interpretation that news environment of trust and dialogue will emerge between communities without any consideration that identity formation in Northern Ireland is based upon a series of in-built mechanisms that aim to deny the logic of the ‘other’ side”
“Despite more creative and managerial mechanism within which to roll out conflict transformation it’s evident that violence has remained a relative and constant feature of Northern Irish society since the ceasefire of 1994.”
p.57
“Residential segregation has been a prominent feature of urban division within Belfast since the onset of industrialisation in the nineteenth century”
“For many residents of segregated places the borders between Unionist/Loyalist and Republican/Nationalist space are not merely boundaries between communities but important instruments in the definition of discursively marked space.”
“The immediate impact of interface walls is to create social, political and cultural distance between communities”
p.58
“There has also been a demand for new interface walls between segregated communities during the current peace process”
p.63
“Other interface are simply understood through a knowledge of ethno-sectarian division, and can be marked by material forms such as a lamppost or bus stop”
p.66
“Segregation and related mobility issues mean that whole swathes of the city are virtually unknown to citizens living within Belfast. Persons of a pensionable age seem to posses a more collective and knowledgeable geography of the city”
p.67
“As previously established a central problem within Belfast is the link between territoriality and the political organisation of space. The work of Gottman (1973) within other segregated arenas contends that space is constantly partitioned through a combination of the physical and the symbolic.
p.67
“As articulated by Sack, the processes that constitute territoriality are primarily expressions of ‘social power’ (1986:5). In this sense, as argued Foucault (1980), power emanates from localised sources of transaction and politicised action.”
p.71
“The embedding of ethno-sectarianism was achieved by the construction of discursive formations that created a systemic and conceptual framework capable of defining ‘truth’. A significant number of those people living in Belfast have been influenced by processes of ethno-sectarian enclaving and the championing of the ‘home’ enclave as morally enhanced through the amalgamation of key symbols and distinct discursive practices.”
Ireland
p.72
“Many people living in interface areas defends their need for physical separation by claiming that it provides them with a degree of security against attack from the ‘other side’. Ironically, protective walls were the very places within which frequent, persistent and current, if often low-level, violence occurred.”
p.82
“Whether imagined or real, it is important that fears and avoidance strategies generated by violence or perceptions of threat are taken seriously because they constitute the manner through which ethno-sectarian decisions and loyalties are fashioned.”
p.83
“The recognition that fear and avoidance are influenced by territoriality and ethno-sectarian practice indicates that abnormal structure of Belfast’s consumption, leisure and labour markets can be interpreted through an understanding of the realities of everyday life.”
p.90
“A common feature of doing this type of work is that respondents cannot readily identify communities on maps but they do know the names of places and ethno-sectarian affiliations of the communities based there.”
p.92
“Nearly 40 per cent of respondents surveyed stated that they had been victims of physical or verbal violence since the ceasefire of 1994.”
p.92
“With regard to community 66 per cent of respondents contacted in 2003 believed that community relations had worsened since 1994.”
p.94
“Most work on fear and mobility has indicated that woman tend to be more fearful, particularly after dark, than are their male counterpart.”
p.96
“Community and history thus served as micro-territorial constructions, which reinforced the manner through which the presentation of hostility was valid and necessary sectarianisation of space”.
p.97
“It was commonly understood that urban space is purposely assembled by both ideological and physical separation. However, one of the most pronounced factors that distanced the sectarian group from those who were non-sectarian or less sectarian was the manner in which they eulogised, through the expression of devotion, the communities which they lived. Each member of the sectarian group imagined their community in terms of notions of utopian integrity, loyalty, kinship and purity”.
p.98
“Space, for those who articulate sectarian discourses, is seem to function as an object that hosts historical ‘truths’ and collectives discourses. Community and history, for this group, serve as micro-territorial constructions, which reinforce the way in which geography presents sectarian hostility as a valid politicisation of space.”
p.100
“Some stated that they would repacking the goods they bought in shops that were obviously purchase in the territory of the ‘other’ religious group.”
p.101
“While they are less atavistic and more malleable than their working-class counterpart, they have not constructed a shared identity capable of challenging the binary politics of Northern Ireland.”
p.171
Territorial conflict in Northern Ireland is played out [avoir lieu] via place-centred interpretations of struggle and is linked to discourses of torment, anguish, moral rectitude and the entitlement of challenge any ‘territorisation’ or ‘threats’ that could occur.
p.172
“The types of lifestyles and identities located within segregated communities have generally been ignored within academic deliberation. Such groups are generally regarded as reactionary and overtly violent. Ultimately, there is a rejection of them and their ideology and representation. In a sense they do not display the ‘rationality that academic require to provide corroboration to them or to espouse their cause. Only groups with a ‘progressive’ perspective, such as those who promote bourgeois notions of community relations, have tended to be deemed worthy of examination.”
p.173
“In deep and complex conflict the capacity of paramilitary groups to assume forms of territorial control means that they are crucial to any process of conflict transformation.”
p.174
‘Belfast is different’ in that social, cultural and political division are so firmly attached to vociferous and rigorous ethno-sectarian discourses. However, the crucial point is that economic, social and cultural divisions that are located in other western societies are also (as is the case of Belfast) exacerbated by actuality that democracy encompasses multiple and disagreed interpretations.
“Unfortunately in Northern Ireland the delineation of one community from the ‘other’ is an active and ongoing parts of identity formation”
p.176
“Spatial inequality, in Belfast as elsewhere, is reproduced by the way in which segregated patterns are overlain on the geography of social need. It is simply not possible to treat these territories as unproblematic or reducible to narrow technical decisions. The construction of space and the way it shapes opportunity and denial and conception of ‘otherness’ is also relevant not only to Belfast but to racialised areas in urban Britain.”
p.180
“This is a society in which multiple constructed geographies of lifestyles, class and welfare and complex renditions of relationship between place and identity are apparently subsumed within a political disputation informed solely by conflicting attitudes to the Union combined with essentially obsolete constructs of national sovereignty. (Graham and Shirlow, 1998:245)
Victimhood and memory are active factors in the reproduction of the past within the present.”
p.2
“Belfast is far from be the post-conflictual city that is dreamed of by planners, investors and wearied British and Irish politician”
p.15
“The ever-present conflict within Northern Ireland is not based upon religion but rather religion acts as a boundary marker with regard to competing aspirations regarding forms of Britishness and Irshness. As Jenkin concludes: ‘Although religion has a place in the repertoire of conflict in Northern Ireland, it is apparent that, for the majority of participants, the situation is seen to be primarily concerned with matters of politics and nationalism, not religious issues’ (1986:16). The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland remains as the key, symbolically defined feature of cultural and political discord (Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999; Wilson and Donnan, 1998). The constitutional border is replicated within cities, towns and villages throughout Northern Ireland. Conflict and its reproduction, at the micro level, are linked to the symbolisation of a constitutionally divided island.”
“In Belfast, unlike most divided cities in the European Union, the most acute and perceived spatial divisions are not simply those of class or race but those of national identity”
p.16
“The issue that affects both communities is not merely that the border exist but that the survival of the border is challenged”
p.17
“Segregation has had the effect, via spatial bordering, of creating containers within which many resident have, in the main, come to accept a unidimensional cultural and political definition”
p.18
“Segregated communities are place that have been engineered, fabricated and managed by political entrepreneur seeking to mobilise political discourse through territorial control.
“Space matters because it mediates the experiences of people in places, and further, it shapes the structure of opportunity set available to then” Heikkila 2001: 260”
p.22
“Even though [bien que] contemporary political violence can be use to justify the perpetuation of segregation it is clear that violence is one of several factors that account for this social and cultural practices”
p.24
“The key principle of crisis management has been to imagine that abnormal problems can solved via normal policy-making strategies”
p.25
“The construction of sectarianised affiliation casts those who do not accept cultural affiliation and repetitive ethno-sectarian discourses as both deviant and Treacherous. As the former MP Gerry Fitt used to say, ‘if you stand in the middle of the road you will get knocked down’. Our work indicates that the implied deterritorialisation need to shift Northern Irish society towards more agreed and agreeable forms of political ownership and consensus-building remains distant and at present geographically rootless.”
p.26
“Does it [the ‘other city’] really represent a new spatially differentiated class with distinctive interests shaped by material pursuits and not simply atavistic sectarian claims?”
- the other city: new suburban developments, with their gated qualities
p.28-29
“Accepting the victimhood, especially publicly, of the ‘other’ community is considered politically inappropriate within the context of ethno-sectarian opposition, as it would emasculate ideological genuineness and encourage a process of accepting responsibility for violent acts. Such a political shift would incapacitate the legitimacy of political ‘resistance’”
p.29
“It is important stress that the decrease in politically motivated violence over the past decade has been accompanied by an intensified process of claiming and ‘owning’ victimhood”
“Recognising that many people involved in ethno-sectarian and violent acts experience disproportionately high rates of fear and exposure to risk as rarely denoted as a motivating factor for the perpetuation of inter-community discord”
p.32
“Institutional approaches are guided by the supposition that conflict has been fuelled by inequality and political exclusion, and that the creation of new and inclusive governance structures will transform the nature and meaning of political hostility”
“ It is also maintained that division can be healed [guéri] through the adoption of new power relationships that followed the Maastrich Treaty and the decline on the centrality of sovereignty within the definition of nationhood”
p.34
“It [consociationalism] assume that identities are primordial and exclusive rather than malleable and relational: high fences [barrière] in other words make good neighbours! A fundamental condition of consociationalism is an overarching allegiance to the shared polity which counteracts these centrifugal forces (Wilford and Wilson, 2001:6)”
p.35
“There has been no post-nationalist turn that has led to a decline in the link between national identity and electoral outcomes”
p.46
“For the DUP political culture is tied to an unswerving commitment to an ethnically defined conception of territorial sovereignty”
p.51
“A further limitation is the interpretation that news environment of trust and dialogue will emerge between communities without any consideration that identity formation in Northern Ireland is based upon a series of in-built mechanisms that aim to deny the logic of the ‘other’ side”
“Despite more creative and managerial mechanism within which to roll out conflict transformation it’s evident that violence has remained a relative and constant feature of Northern Irish society since the ceasefire of 1994.”
p.57
“Residential segregation has been a prominent feature of urban division within Belfast since the onset of industrialisation in the nineteenth century”
“For many residents of segregated places the borders between Unionist/Loyalist and Republican/Nationalist space are not merely boundaries between communities but important instruments in the definition of discursively marked space.”
“The immediate impact of interface walls is to create social, political and cultural distance between communities”
p.58
“There has also been a demand for new interface walls between segregated communities during the current peace process”
p.63
“Other interface are simply understood through a knowledge of ethno-sectarian division, and can be marked by material forms such as a lamppost or bus stop”
p.66
“Segregation and related mobility issues mean that whole swathes of the city are virtually unknown to citizens living within Belfast. Persons of a pensionable age seem to posses a more collective and knowledgeable geography of the city”
p.67
“As previously established a central problem within Belfast is the link between territoriality and the political organisation of space. The work of Gottman (1973) within other segregated arenas contends that space is constantly partitioned through a combination of the physical and the symbolic.
p.67
“As articulated by Sack, the processes that constitute territoriality are primarily expressions of ‘social power’ (1986:5). In this sense, as argued Foucault (1980), power emanates from localised sources of transaction and politicised action.”
p.71
“The embedding of ethno-sectarianism was achieved by the construction of discursive formations that created a systemic and conceptual framework capable of defining ‘truth’. A significant number of those people living in Belfast have been influenced by processes of ethno-sectarian enclaving and the championing of the ‘home’ enclave as morally enhanced through the amalgamation of key symbols and distinct discursive practices.”
Ireland
p.72
“Many people living in interface areas defends their need for physical separation by claiming that it provides them with a degree of security against attack from the ‘other side’. Ironically, protective walls were the very places within which frequent, persistent and current, if often low-level, violence occurred.”
p.82
“Whether imagined or real, it is important that fears and avoidance strategies generated by violence or perceptions of threat are taken seriously because they constitute the manner through which ethno-sectarian decisions and loyalties are fashioned.”
p.83
“The recognition that fear and avoidance are influenced by territoriality and ethno-sectarian practice indicates that abnormal structure of Belfast’s consumption, leisure and labour markets can be interpreted through an understanding of the realities of everyday life.”
p.90
“A common feature of doing this type of work is that respondents cannot readily identify communities on maps but they do know the names of places and ethno-sectarian affiliations of the communities based there.”
p.92
“Nearly 40 per cent of respondents surveyed stated that they had been victims of physical or verbal violence since the ceasefire of 1994.”
p.92
“With regard to community 66 per cent of respondents contacted in 2003 believed that community relations had worsened since 1994.”
p.94
“Most work on fear and mobility has indicated that woman tend to be more fearful, particularly after dark, than are their male counterpart.”
p.96
“Community and history thus served as micro-territorial constructions, which reinforced the manner through which the presentation of hostility was valid and necessary sectarianisation of space”.
p.97
“It was commonly understood that urban space is purposely assembled by both ideological and physical separation. However, one of the most pronounced factors that distanced the sectarian group from those who were non-sectarian or less sectarian was the manner in which they eulogised, through the expression of devotion, the communities which they lived. Each member of the sectarian group imagined their community in terms of notions of utopian integrity, loyalty, kinship and purity”.
p.98
“Space, for those who articulate sectarian discourses, is seem to function as an object that hosts historical ‘truths’ and collectives discourses. Community and history, for this group, serve as micro-territorial constructions, which reinforce the way in which geography presents sectarian hostility as a valid politicisation of space.”
p.100
“Some stated that they would repacking the goods they bought in shops that were obviously purchase in the territory of the ‘other’ religious group.”
p.101
“While they are less atavistic and more malleable than their working-class counterpart, they have not constructed a shared identity capable of challenging the binary politics of Northern Ireland.”
p.171
Territorial conflict in Northern Ireland is played out [avoir lieu] via place-centred interpretations of struggle and is linked to discourses of torment, anguish, moral rectitude and the entitlement of challenge any ‘territorisation’ or ‘threats’ that could occur.
p.172
“The types of lifestyles and identities located within segregated communities have generally been ignored within academic deliberation. Such groups are generally regarded as reactionary and overtly violent. Ultimately, there is a rejection of them and their ideology and representation. In a sense they do not display the ‘rationality that academic require to provide corroboration to them or to espouse their cause. Only groups with a ‘progressive’ perspective, such as those who promote bourgeois notions of community relations, have tended to be deemed worthy of examination.”
p.173
“In deep and complex conflict the capacity of paramilitary groups to assume forms of territorial control means that they are crucial to any process of conflict transformation.”
p.174
‘Belfast is different’ in that social, cultural and political division are so firmly attached to vociferous and rigorous ethno-sectarian discourses. However, the crucial point is that economic, social and cultural divisions that are located in other western societies are also (as is the case of Belfast) exacerbated by actuality that democracy encompasses multiple and disagreed interpretations.
“Unfortunately in Northern Ireland the delineation of one community from the ‘other’ is an active and ongoing parts of identity formation”
p.176
“Spatial inequality, in Belfast as elsewhere, is reproduced by the way in which segregated patterns are overlain on the geography of social need. It is simply not possible to treat these territories as unproblematic or reducible to narrow technical decisions. The construction of space and the way it shapes opportunity and denial and conception of ‘otherness’ is also relevant not only to Belfast but to racialised areas in urban Britain.”
p.180
“This is a society in which multiple constructed geographies of lifestyles, class and welfare and complex renditions of relationship between place and identity are apparently subsumed within a political disputation informed solely by conflicting attitudes to the Union combined with essentially obsolete constructs of national sovereignty. (Graham and Shirlow, 1998:245)
Victimhood and memory are active factors in the reproduction of the past within the present.”
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