The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the thirty-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 the 1998.

This volume has fore fronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and has allowed 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.