Cultural Peace Work in ‘Post-Conflict’ Northern Ireland

While regarded as an exemplar of a successfully resolved conflict since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided place. The discord between Republican and Loyalist nationalisms persist as a legacy of the structural and spatial segregation of the Partition of Ireland (1922) and the ethno-national conflict known as the Troubles (1968–1998). So how are people who live in the region encountering and performing peace and trust? Outside of state-sponsored approaches to peacebuilding, in what other ways are peaceful relations fostered? Guided by the concept of 'people's peace praxis', which calls for the study of how ordinary humans, not the state or politicians, generate peace, this paper explores the role of cultural peace work in contemporary Northern Ireland. Cultural peace work refers to the active role of creative cultural production in peacebuilding, examples of which will be examined in the city of Derry/Londonderry.