Queer Agonistic Peacebuilding: Pluralisation, Destabilisation, and Interlinking in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland

This article brings Mouffe’s agonistic democracy into dialogue with queer peacebuilding to analyse how LGBTQ + mobilisation reopens democratic space in post-conflict societies. Post-conflict orders often seek to tame antagonistic conflict by accommodating the main groups while reproducing exclusion through heteronormative “shared rules”—norms of respectability, family citizenship, and moral regulation that determine who can appear as a legitimate political subject and which claims count as peace-relevant. This article theorises heteronormativity as a technology of post-conflict hegemony and specifies three dynamics of reopening: pluralisation, destabilisation, and interlinking. The case study of post-Agreement Northern Ireland is to explore queer agonistic peacebuilding. Drawing on campaign archives, Assembly records, and cultural analysis of artistic performance, the article traces how marriage-equality contention, rights advocacy, and queer cultural interventions expanded the peace agenda, exposed hegemonic contradictions, and forged solidarities beyond bloc politics. The article argues that post-conflict openness is not guaranteed but is made through sustained contestation. Thus agonistic peacebuilding must attend to the heteronormative closure technologies that settlements embed.