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.
Author Biography:
Laura McAtackney is Professor in Archaeology at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Ireland, and Professor in Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She uses contemporary archaeological approaches to understand difficult recent pasts including the Northern Irish conflict and peace process, gendered institutions and colonial legacies. She is the author of An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze (2014).
MáirtÃn Ó Catháin is Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the University of Central Lancashire. He has also worked for the Workers’ Educational Association and Ulster People’s College in Northern Ireland in the past and has specific interests in local labour and social history, oral history, and everyday life approaches to the Northern Irish conflict and peace process.
