Between Conflict and Peace: An Analysis of the Complex Consequences of the Good Friday Agreement

In the two decades since signing, the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) continues to generate acrimonious debate over whether it has brought about sustainable peace or fomented weak and sectarian governance institutions. In this article, I review the formation and outworking of the GFA. In so doing, I go beyond either/or analyses of the GFA to identify the complex forms of political agency it has generated, not necessarily envisioned by the Agreement’s architects. I draw particular attention to the ways in which the central support beams of the Agreement—consociationalism and Europeanisation—have gradually become weakened to threaten the sustainability of power-sharing institutions.