“We have peace,” declared “Séamus,” a taxi driver in national west Belfast. “And they can have their culture, or whatever they want to call it, as long as it’s not in my face. And I can have mine, and I hope I’m not in their face.”¹ Séamus was explaining to me his attitude toward loyalists and the new, separate peace in Northern Ireland in May 2010, while he showed me around the West Belfast Taxi Association’s new taxi terminal in Belfast city center. The spacious new terminal, its outer walls decorated with murals from Irish legends, serves as a sort...

At the bottom of the Falls Road, in the Divis area of west Belfast, one wall has become a dedicated site for murals. It is called the “international wall,” and the murals there draw connections between Northern Ireland and other countries. Periodically, the murals are changed; exemplary paintings have commemorated the Basque struggle, expressed sympathy with besieged Gazans, and celebrated historical figures like Che Guevara. A long-standing trope of the murals is comparison of nationalist experiences in Northern Ireland with African American experiences in the United States. So, for example, in 2010, nine years after the Holy Cross protests discussed...

During my fieldwork in west Belfast, research participants frequently described triumphs over state agencies, especially welfare bureaucracies. “Sarah,” a community activist from the Shankill, recounted a particularly funny story about “doing the double” (working in the informal economy while claiming welfare benefits). In the 1980s, her husband claimed unemployment while secretly driving a taxi. One bright summer day, her family went for a rare beach outing, paddling and exploring tidal pools. But on returning home, their mood darkened when her husband found a summons to the dole office. They hurried the children back into the car and rushed to arrive...

“Do you think we get the politics we deserve?” a lawyer asked me over coffee on a gray morning in August 2011. She leaned back and answered her question before I could reply: “I do. It’s nonsense to say that political representatives here don’t speak for people—they do it well enough to keep getting votes!” Thirteen years after the Good Friday Agreement, and four years after devolved government became functional, “Yvonne” had a bleak view of postconflict politics, as a kind of “cold peace.” A specialist in human rights, she said politicians and the electorate remain preoccupied with collective...

“At least I wasn’t a traitor!” bellowed a Democratic Unionist Party councillor in the September 1997 Belfast City Council meeting. He was enraged that Progressive Unionist Party councillors David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson did not vote to commemorate the Bloody Friday bombings of 1972. As if they had rehearsed, the Sinn Féin delegates sarcastically hooted in unison, spectators to an entertaining intraunionist spat.

At that meeting, I received my first lesson in Northern Ireland’s politics of the past. “Lisa,” a research participant and city councillor, had invited me to the meeting. In those days, despite the ceasefires, security was strict...

“Over the years, the way she has treated my community, I have opposed her at every turn. I can’t tell you the number of waiters I’ve told to spit in her food.” “Daniel,” a young civil servant from a nationalist background, was relaxing with a pint as we enjoyed late evening sunshine in May 2010. Like many pub conversations in Belfast that year, ours had turned into a gleeful dissection of the most recent Iris Robinson scandal. The wife of first minister Peter Robinson had been “outed” that winter for having an affair with a nineteen-year-old family friend. Her infidelity...

In the twenty-first century, Northern Ireland’s inclusive peace process was attenuated; many negotiations about the Good Friday Agreement’s (GFA) implementation took place between the British government and one or two political parties. Senior British advisers such as Jonathan Powell (2008) frame this asrealpolitik, recognizing that extreme factions in a conflict require more accommodation, and wield greater power, than centrists. Against triumphal accounts of the peace process, academics have documented increasing communal and class-based divisions (e.g., Shirlow and Murtagh 2006), and critiqued how the agreement institutionalizes sectarian politics (Finlay 2010). Social, political, and economic data indicate a fragile peace; uncertainties...