Peace,Temporality,and Generations: How Young People Make Sense of Northern Ireland’s Long Peace Process

Abstract

There is relatively little research on long-term peace and the implications for a peace process of generational change. This article advances the sociology of peace by using the lenses of temporality and generations to understand the attitudes of people living within an enduring political transition. The article begins by developing the concept of peace time, meaning subjective perceptions of time and change during a post-conflict period. It then outlines four divergent varieties of peace time identifiable in interviews with 27 young people who were born around the time of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. With reference to Mannheim’s sociology of generations, the article proposes that the varieties of peace time can be understood as interpretations of the interviewees’ generational inheritance of peace. The policy implications for peacebuilding – conceived of as a permanent endeavour – are discussed.

The final episode of Derry Girls, the internationally popular and critically acclaimed television comedy, deals with the 1998 referendum on Northern Ireland’s ‘Good Friday’ or ‘Belfast’ Agreement. After the characters make their choices in the voting booths, the last shot lingers on a little girl who is literally walking into the sunlight. The meaning is clear: the ultimate purpose of the peace agreement was to create a brighter future for the next generation. The episode was made over 20 years after the referendum, when political instability was creating a sense that peace progress had stalled or was in reverse. It may be assumed, then, that the message was to have a contemporary resonance. Derry Girls was showing the girl’s generation – now young adults – the enduring significance of the Agreement. Perhaps they needed to figuratively ‘vote yes’ in the present, for the sake of their own future.

The episode speaks to a temporal conundrum in all peace processes and political transitions. They are designed to benefit succeeding generations, yet those generations will have no direct knowledge of life during the previous dispensation and may therefore have little appreciation of the transition’s achievements. Paradoxically, the very longevity and normalisation of peace may be a source of public misunderstanding or apathy. This conundrum is at the heart of peacemaking and exemplifies what sociologists of generations recognise as the social and epistemological significance of the ongoing replacement of generations (Pilcher, 1994).

However, we know little about this conundrum in real cases. Indeed, the fact that patterns of conflict always survive a peace agreement may mean the conflict, or the agreement, remains ‘in the present’ for many people. There is relatively little research on long-term peace. The field of Peace and Conflict Studies has been accused of ‘recentism’ – giving disproportionate attention to the present or recent past (Mac Ginty, 2022a: 193). Only a handful of studies such as Mac Ginty (2016), Mueller-Hirth (2017) and Reychler (2015) have explicitly examined time and temporality in peacemaking.

This article combines ideas from the sociology of peace, with concepts of time, temporality and generational change, to understand attitudes to long-term peace and what these attitudes mean for the task of peacebuilding conceived of as a permanent, multigenerational endeavour. Empirically it draws on in-depth interviews with 27 young people in Northern Ireland who were born around the time of the 1998 Agreement and who therefore are the main purported beneficiaries of the peace process. The first section discusses how a peace process aspires to create a common perception across a conflict-affected society of simultaneous, linear movement through time from a dark past to a bright future. Post-settlement conditions, as well as eventual generational change, make this extremely difficult to achieve. Instead, those conditions produce a diversity of post-conflict temporalities. We refer to these temporalities as ‘peace time’.

Then, after explaining the Northern Ireland context and methodology of the study, we present the findings, outlining four varieties of peace time identifiable in the interviews. These are: detachment (the past as unconnected to the present or as an obstacle to the future); appreciation (the present as the future envisioned in past peacemaking); fatalism (the present as stuck in the past or in a repeating cycle); and frustration-ambition (the present as an incentive to changing the future). The article elaborates these via interviewees’ reflections on both their own everyday experiences (e.g. in the economy, socialising, education and their sense of security) and their awareness and assessments of post-Agreement politics.

The discussion places the findings in the context of the sociology of generations, which is concerned with both the nature of a generation, and how accumulated culture and knowledge are perpetually adopted and adapted by young people. The four varieties of peace time can be understood as different interpretations of the interviewees’ generational inheritance; that is, different attitudes regarding whether the peace process is their present concern and future responsibility or the preserve of a previous generation, and whether the peace process can or should be modified in the process of generational change. Implications for peacebuilding policy and practice are discussed. Overall, the article advances the sociology of peace processes (Brewer, 2022), indicating how long-term peace is socially constructed and experienced, and the relationship between generational change and peacebuilding.

Peace Time

Political projects and ideologies are often ‘temporally structured’, meaning they ‘are constructed through the way that the past, the present, and the future are related to one another’ (Gokmenoglu, 2022: 651). The political project of a peace process is infused with a strong futurity, expressed in countless phrases used in talk about peacemaking. Parties do not want to ‘return to the past’; they want ‘a brighter future’ and ‘a new beginning’. The goal is ‘sustainable’ peace and ‘permanent’ peace. Since time ‘moves’, peace is also commonly expressed in a spatial metaphor. Peace is a ‘journey’ in which there is ‘movement’ and ‘momentum’ (or not). A peace deal or a handshake is a ‘milestone’. Society has ‘come far’, or has ‘a long way to go’, and so on. The idealised image of a peace process conveyed in this language could be said to be an ascending line on a graph, indicating the progressive widening and deepening of peace over time.

This teleology mirrors the narrative structure of nationalism since a peace process in an intra-state conflict is a nation-building project. The emergence of linear time through mass literacy and print media has been thought to be central to the emergence of nationalism. It permitted collective, horizontal identification among a large number of people who would never meet each other (Anderson, 1991). The ambition of a peace process is that the collective sense of temporality on which group identity is based expands beyond a single identity group to encompass all groups. All should buy in to and perceive joint movement towards a better future (or, as it is often called in Northern Ireland, a ‘shared future’). An established strategy for achieving this is ‘dealing with the past’ – seeking resolution or consensus on past violence – through a variety of transitional justice mechanisms, both legal, and cultural and commemorative (Kim et al., 2024). As Rigney (2012: 251–252) comments:

the idea that the mediated production of common memory narratives can and should be ‘engineered’ (orchestrated, managed) in order to become productive of a peaceful and just co-existence, rather than the source of division, remains one of the underlying assumptions of (post-) conflict governance.

There is an ‘interplay between recollection and future-building’ (Rigney, 2012: 251) in the construction of a post-conflict political community, just as there was in forging traditional nation states.

In actuality, achieving a common sense of temporality across a society is extremely unlikely due to post-settlement conditions. One challenge is that a peace process involves many kinds of change which move at different speeds. Lederach (1999: 32) notes that people expect peace accords to address ‘structural violence, and that solutions will proceed on the same timeline as the diminishing curve of direct violence. This rarely, if ever, has been the case.’ Similarly, Brewer (2022: 28) argues that the ‘social peace process’ (social and relational transformation) happens much more slowly than the ‘political peace process’ of elite negotiation, while Mac Ginty (2016: 27) writes that: ‘Everyday peace may operate according to a very different time dimension than the “capital city peace” of signing ceremonies.’

In fact, these and other scholars argue that peacebuilding and social transformation should not only be recognised as slow but as never-ending. Notably, Paffenholz (2021) critiques the linear, time-bound and results-driven model of a peace process contained in western liberal peacebuilding, arguing instead for ‘perpetual peacebuilding’. Here, the bright future of peace is a utopian goal that is never fully realised. In the same vein, Lederach (2005: 47) rejects the common image of a peace deal as ‘a line in time’, suggesting that it instead should be imagined as the beginning of ‘a context-based, permanent, and dynamic platform capable of non-violently generating solutions to ongoing episodes of conflict’.

A second challenge to achieving a common sense of temporality is disagreements over the likely future created by the agreement. A peace process – despite the aspirational rhetoric – always generates opposition, disappointment, and resistance. Anti-peace agreement ‘spoilers’ (Stedman, 1997) may be accused of wanting to ‘drag us back to the past’. Some sections of society may claim they are being ‘left behind’. While transitional justice is pursued in the hope of achieving a common sense of the past and future, it is usually subject to intense political contestation and its impacts prove to be uncertain and uneven (see Kim et al., 2024). It may be perpetrators who are most eager to ‘move on’ from the past (Rigney, 2012). All this means that post-conflict societies display a complicated and distinctive ‘emotional landscape’ (Brewer, 2022: 63) comprising ‘past-focussed emotions like fear, guilt, anger, and shame, and future-focussed emotions like compassion, forgiveness, emotional, empathy, and restorative humanism’ (Brewer, 2022: 66–67).

The diverse fears, hopes and experiences that exist in the wake of conflict are interconnected with temporality and how the human experience of time is much more variable than the formal constancy of the clock. ‘Clock time’ is a limited commodity that arose from the demands of industrial capitalism. ‘Social time’ however is ‘the intersubjective conceptualisation of social life’ (Hassard, 1990: 6) and may be based on ecological cycles or religious and social events. Added to this is ‘subjective time’: the fact that individuals judge duration and perceive the passage of time differently (Arstila and Lloyd, 2014). This is influenced by personal and collective experiences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, people reported changes to their normal experience of time (Coleman and Lyon, 2023).

The subjectivity of the experience of time is pertinent to understanding experiences and constructions of peace. For example, in a study of victims/survivors of apartheid in South Africa, Mueller-Hirth (2017: 187), finds what she calls ‘temporalities of victimhood’. People’s trauma and unmet demands for justice put them at odds with ‘the dominant linear temporality of peace processes and transitional justice’ in which healing is meant to occur progressively (see also Robinson, 2022). Sufferers of trauma of all kinds speak about being frozen in that moment (Herman, 2015). In a peace process, people’s (gendered) experiences, memories, and dispositions, in addition to their interpretations of political discourses about the peace process, impact on ‘how long’ they perceive peace to have been, or ‘how far’ they think society has come.

The attitudinal and emotional dimensions of a peace process are, broadly, well known in relation to the immediate post-agreement period. However, we know much less about them over the longer term. Peace and Conflict Studies focuses on the short-term application of the techniques and tools of peacemaking. Indeed, ‘when thinking conceptually about time in relation to peace processes’, as Mac Ginty (2022b: 183) writes, ‘our analytical timelines are often quite short’. That said, case studies point to challenges posed by the ‘ageing’ of peace. For instance, in places like Bosnia, South Africa and Sri Lanka, widespread disillusionment with ‘peace’ is rooted in the economic plight of most people (Brewer et al., 2018; Vogel, 2022).

Yet, not only are attitudes and emotions likely to evolve as the peace process unfurls, but the passage of time ultimately produces an entirely new cohort of people. One of the sociological repercussions of the ongoing appearance of generations (as opposed to a world in which the same people lived forever) is that each generation encounters accumulated culture anew, and is afforded the chance to keep, discard or adapt parts of this inheritance (Mannheim, 1952). Bristow (2016: 2) casts the ‘problem of generations as a problem of knowledge: how we as a society ensure that the world lives on through those whom we leave behind’. This, then, is a further challenge to achieving or sustaining a common sense of temporality in a post-conflict society: eventually, a peace process must transfer to people who have not experienced the circumstances that gave rise to it, did not pursue it, but find themselves labelled as the generation that should be benefitting from it. In the Discussion, and in the light of the findings, we analyse the implications of generational change on peacebuilding.

To summarise, a peace process is expressed in a temporal narrative of positive progress. However, the many kinds of change entailed in a peace process occur at different rates, while people’s expectations and perceptions of change vary dramatically, influenced by psychology, political narratives, what peace impacts they see around them, and generational location. These considerations point to particular modes of temporality associated with a peace process which may be called ‘peace time’. We define this as the lived experience of time during a post-conflict period, which is an amalgam of perceptions of the rate of change (interpersonal, social. and political) and experiences of clock/calendar time. Peace time, then, is by nature plural and subjective, and so there will be many ‘peace times’ comprising a variety of experiences and perceptions of peace and change.

Although existing literature points to temporality in a peace process possessing distinct textures, we have little sense of how this may manifest in the thinking and attitudes of ordinary people in a conflict-affected society, especially one in which much time has passed. Therefore, using the case of the ‘post-conflict generation’ in Northern Ireland, this article investigates how time and generations play a role in the meanings people ascribe to their experience of a peace process.

The Case of Northern Ireland

The conflict in Northern Ireland – often called ‘the Troubles’ – was fought over the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom (UK) and the rights of the Irish nationalist minority. Pro-British and mainly Protestant ‘unionists’ wished, and wish, to stay in the UK while pro-Irish and mainly Roman Catholic ‘nationalists’ want a united Ireland state. Three-and-a-half thousand people were killed, and tens of thousands were injured between the late 1960s and late 1990s. The violence mostly came to an end with the 1998 ‘Belfast’ or ‘Good Friday’ Agreement, which instituted a power-sharing system of regional government (see Cochrane, 2021).

Northern Ireland, however, is still affected by the legacy of violence and division in numerous ways. Only a minority of victims have achieved justice and truth. Paramilitary groups still exist, exerting mafia-style power in poorer areas. Power-sharing has been suspended numerous times when inter-party relations have broken down. The 2016 decision of the UK to leave the European Union (EU) destabilised opinion, bringing borders and national identities centre-stage again. Relatedly, interest in and discussion about Irish unity has grown. Society has also diversified since 1998, with an increasing vote for parties that are neither unionist nor nationalist, growth in the population born outside of the region, and a wider recognition of identities based on gender and sexuality. This has spurred calls for reforms to be made to the 1998 Agreement, which was designed to protect unionist and nationalist groupings.

All this means that young people in Northern Ireland exist in a society that is the product of a complex of very different forces. It is still governed according to an agreement forged in a previous era. But it is also experiencing the ‘normality’ of consumerist capitalism, immigration, and global cultural, educational, and economic connections. Public debate focuses on generic socio-economic issues such as public services and social inequality, but these topics are interspersed with disputes about conflict commemoration, transitional justice, and constitutional change, which are rooted in events that happened long before young people were born (for reviews of contemporary Northern Ireland see Community Relations Council, 2023; Coulter et al., 2021).

Methodology

Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 27 young people (aged 18–24) between November 2021 and February 2022. They were part of Sarah Wallace’s doctoral research, supervised by David Mitchell and Brendan Ciarán Browne. Due to pandemic restrictions, interviews were conducted online, and they lasted between 45 and 75 minutes. Interviewees were accessed via a combination of purposive and snowball sampling. Purposive sampling was used to ensure a range of community backgrounds, gender balance and residential location. The call for interviewees was shared through social media and the interviewer’s existing contacts, but the youth wings of political parties and some community groups were also contacted. This was combined with referrals by the interviewees to others who might participate, producing the final sample which broadly achieved the hoped-for diversity. The sample comprised 12 males and 15 females. Self-described political positions were nationalist (8), republican (3), unionist (5), loyalist (4), non-aligned (6) and socialist (1). The full meaning of these identity labels for each participant is outside the scope of this article, but broadly, ‘republican’ means a supporter of Sinn Féin, the traditionally more hardline Irish nationalist party. ‘Loyalist’ usually refers to working-class unionists, while ‘non-aligned’ means people who do not identify as either unionist or nationalist. The party or national preference of the ‘socialist’ interviewee is unclear. In terms of religious identification, as would be expected given the nature of social division in Northern Ireland, all unionists and loyalists said they were either ‘Protestant’, ‘Christian’ or ‘atheist’, and all nationalists and republicans said they were either ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘Christian’ or ‘atheist’. All non-aligned said they were ‘atheist’. We acknowledge that, inevitably, those who volunteered to be interviewed may have been of above average political awareness and articulateness.

To gain a relatively comprehensive picture of interviewees’ attitudes to the society in which they lived, the researchers selected four main interview topics: attitudes to economic opportunities; physical security (including perceptions of the police and paramilitaries); politics (including the Agreement and power-sharing system); and the interviewees’ social identities. Data analysis combined an inductive grounded theory approach (Bryman, 2015) with thematic analysis (Braun and Clark, 2022). A grounded theory approach was used in that temporality was not the focus of the interviews but was instead identified during repeated reading of the data by both authors as a prominent motif employed by most of the interviewees. We then reanalysed the interviews with temporality in mind, using thematic analysis, and found four contrasting ways in which it manifested in the data. We report these four themes using illustrative data extracts set within an analytical narrative.

Our focus is on categorising ways in which subjective experiences of time were articulated (what we are calling varieties of peace time), rather than individuals. We are not boxing each respondent in a category. In what were informal and wide-ranging interviews, some people exhibited more than one of the mindsets. That said, most of the interviewees did tend towards one or other of the four orientations. Regarding positionality, the interviewer is from Derry and was born in the 1990s and thus had opinions and experiences regarding the topics of the research. We believe this aided the frankness of discussion as well as interpretation of the data.

Findings

In the interviews, we identified four ways in which respondents articulated their views on peace in Northern Ireland using language related to where society was thought to be in time. With each quotation, we give information on the speaker’s sex and political position.

Detachment: The Past as Irrelevant to the Present and an Obstacle to the Future

A minority of interviewees exhibited detachment from both the conflict and the 1998 Agreement. Some respondents felt that the constant intrusion of the past into the present was unfair on younger people: ‘When are we going to draw the line with [end] the inquiries? Young people are carrying the burden of the past and we weren’t even alive. We need to move on, not look back’ (Interview 25, male, nationalist). The phrase ‘drawing a line under the past’ is commonly used for the position of opposing further police and judicial investigations into conflict-related crimes; it represents the view that truth-finding and prosecutions are not necessarily needed or beneficial in transitional societies. This interviewee believed that investigating the past brought it into the present, to the detriment of people who had no role in the conflict. Similarly, as this person said: ‘I respect what the older generation went through, but we’re here now and we need stuff to happen. We can’t keep letting the past define our future or take away from it’ (Interview 7, female, nationalist).

A similar desire to decouple the present from the past was voiced in relation to reconciliation work. This work was perceived as servicing the needs of the past, rather than today. Some participants said it was their right to have a ‘fresh start’. For this, forgetting might be needed:

It [reconciliation] makes us too focused on the past, and that’s dangerous because sometimes I think it brings up old emotions and almost reminds people not to get on with a certain group. I think it’s a good thing not to think about it too much or know too much so we can have a fresh start. (Interview 16, female, nationalist)

For some participants, reconciliation was only relevant to those responsible for the conflict, the ‘older generation’:

It’s [reconciliation] important, but not as much for us, more so for the older generations because that’s where a lot of young people’s knowledge and opinions come from so we need to go back to the ones who were actually affected and then work forward from there. (Interview 23, male, unionist)

In this view, it is the older generation who need to be reconciled, not least because they may still be transmitting prejudice to the new generation. Above, it was noted how group anxieties survive a peace agreement to destabilise post-settlement politics and society. Some of the interviewees lay the blame for this at the ‘conflict generation’ and accordingly, it is only they who are thought to require peacebuilding.

Interviewees who displayed detachment were not apathetic or uninformed. An even smaller number of interviewees exhibited such an outlook. For instance, when asked about their views of the Good Friday Agreement, two participants were indifferent, claiming: ‘It’s just doesn’t bother me, I don’t really have an opinion on it’ (Interview 22, female, non-aligned) and ‘I don’t really know what it means . . . it doesn’t impact my life, I missed the hype’ (Interview 23, male, unionist).

Fatalism: Stuck in Time

A much more prevalent attitude in the sample was the sense that, not only are aspects of conflict and division associated with ‘the Troubles’ still evident, but the length of time that had elapsed since the 1998 Agreement proved the high likelihood that the future would continue in the mould of the past. This was particularly clear in interviewees’ reflections on three topics: ongoing violence, ongoing political instability and ongoing poor community relationships. This perception negatively impacted some interviewees’ confidence in their own futures.

Regarding politics, power-sharing government has only operated for around 60% of the time since 1998. Inter-party disputes over the decommissioning of weapons, cultural policy, party links with paramilitaries, and Brexit, have caused government to collapse. Interviewees were cynical. One participant criticised the behaviour of politicians, saying:

It’s all about being suspicious and jumping to conclusions about people and being adversarial towards them. Then that filters down into an already divided society. It’s been that way forever and it doesn’t feel like it’s going to change anytime soon. (Interview 1, male, socialist)

Referring to how public services have declined amid the lack of political direction during periods of no government, this interviewee articulated a sense of time being at a standstill because of political inertia:

I was so angry because I was on waiting lists for a medical condition for two-and-a-half years for a first appointment and that was an urgent referral. And I waited another two years for an operation. So there was no one there advocating for me or pushing things forward. I think I calculated it one day there’s been like a sixth of my life that Northern Ireland hasn’t had a government. It’s a disgrace. (Interview 12, female, loyalist)

The view that time has demonstrated power-sharing to be a failure was repeated by others:

Stormont is not going to last forever, it’s proved time and time again it doesn’t work. (Interview 2, female, republican)

How can it be fit for purpose when the past 14 years have been nothing but dysfunction and a lack of progress? It doesn’t work. (Interview 13, male, nationalist)

It is entirely unsustainable and everyone knows it. (Interview 4, male, unionist)

The suggestion was that the slow pace of the political peace process had had a concomitant impact on the social peace process and improvements in people’s lives. One participant recalled his daily experience of community work, which left him feeling hopeless about the kind of society that young people are growing up in in Northern Ireland. He said:

Every day the wains [children] will ask me . . . if I’m gay, or a Protestant or a Fenian [abusive term for a Catholic], or they’ll tell me to fuck off because I’m an outsider – in those words, and they’re not even 10 yet. You hear them talking about how they want all the Catholics and Protestants to be kept separate, all while singing songs like ‘fuck the Pope’. I just be thinking to myself like what hope is there if nine-year-olds are going on like that? (Interview 13, male, nationalist)

Several participants also remarked on the lack of progress in Northern Ireland in terms of moving on from politico-religious division, for example: ‘We’re so stuck, we’re not going anywhere. And we’re a couple of generations deep now and we still haven’t moved on. Will everything be green and orange [centred on the unionist–nationalist conflict] forever?’ (Interview 18, male, republican). Another participant said: ‘We’re still a part of a sectarian stagnant society. We’re not a peace generation, but one that is continuing a sectarian culture of the past’ (Interview 21, male, unionist).

Unsurprisingly, ongoing sporadic violence and the persistence of paramilitaries were held up as the clearest signs of the past infecting the present. Interviewees spoke of such violence as an anachronism – a piece of the past that incongruously remained in the present:

Sure not that long ago young Catholics and Protestants, like young people, were fighting on the Shankill Road. And it’s 2022. This is not peace. This is like purgatory. (Interview 21, male, unionist)

I remember one time one of the schools in my area couldn’t go in because there was a bomb scare and it was like, Jesus Christ, where are we? It’s 2019. (Interview 10, female, nationalist)

It really annoys me that they [paramilitaries] even exist, and we’re still talking about them. Wish they would all just fuck off and leave us alone. My generation want to be done with that. (Interview 20, male, non-aligned)

Many interviewees felt powerless to prevent Northern Ireland remaining stuck in the past or in repeating cycles of dysfunction. This had a major influence on how some of them thought about their futures. Several said they intended to leave Northern Ireland because they could not imagine that the bright future that they hoped for themselves would materialise in a region so influenced by the past. One, indeed, wished to work as a historian or researcher in a museum. But he said:

I have no intention of working here and going over the same debates and fall-outs. It would be too frustrating and depressing. I want to go work somewhere that history isn’t about ‘he said, she said’ or ‘themuns [them] versus us’. (Interview 26, male, unionist)

Overall, those who expressed fatalism suggested that the ‘peace generation’ was a misnomer and it was carrying on the conflicts bequeathed to it by the previous generation, and yet, perhaps contradictorily, the young people identified themselves as being different, and wanting a different future.

Appreciation: The Present as the Future Envisioned in Past Peacemaking

Less common than the fatalist perspective was the acknowledgement that the present was the product of peacemaking effort in the past. Society and everyday life, therefore, were understood as having changed considerably. Participants appreciated that they were reaping the benefits of agreements made in the past. This theme emerged most prominently when respondents were asked about their attitudes to the Good Friday Agreement.

Several were emphatic that it is as important and relevant now as it was in 1998. One said: ‘I turned one, two days before the Good Friday Agreement was signed and it’s largely responsible for the fact that I grew up in peace, so of course it’s still important. We need it to keep the peace’ (Interview 15, female, nationalist). ‘It [the Agreement] must be protected at all costs’ (Interview 6, female, non-aligned), said another person. Another participant echoed this idea that the Agreement’s job is not finished because peace is an ongoing endeavour, saying:

I found it in my granny’s house and I had a look. It’s symbolic of what people can do when they work together and it’s relevant because the peace process isn’t over. Why would we move on from the Good Friday Agreement if we’re still in a peace process?’ (Interview 17, female, non-aligned)

These views echo the scholarly arguments noted above that peacebuilding should be never-ending, and peace agreements, living and evolving frameworks for conflict resolution.

Rather than moving on from the Agreement, some said it was imperative for the public to go back to it and reinforce its principles:

I think people can undervalue the Good Friday Agreement. Sometimes I think everyone could do with reminding themselves of what it actually says so it can be lived out fully today. (Interview 7, female, nationalist)

I think we have treated the Good Friday Agreement as though it’s just something that was made and done. But it’s the foundation for everything here, present tense, so we need to get back to it ASAP and implement it properly. (Interview 13, male, nationalist, emphasis added)

These perspectives held that not only was the Agreement still relevant, but its full realisation was yet to come. It remained the template for the future. One participant stated her concern over what could happen if the Agreement was subject to reform saying:

I think if we started to in any way touch it, it would be like when you have a loose thread in your jumper and you pull it and your jumper just falls away. It would be better to work on adhering to it properly than trying to change it. (Interview 15, female, nationalist)

Frustration-Ambition: The Present as an Incentive to Change the Future

A fourth prominent theme in the young people’s reflections on contemporary Northern Ireland was a sense of peace time that we call frustration-ambition. We describe this as a composite of two feelings because, unlike the fatalism above, frustration is here accompanied by a sense of agency, and indeed responsibility, regarding preventing the conflicts of the past from determining the future. This emerged mainly during discussion of three topics: whether respondents see a future for themselves in Northern Ireland, reconciliation and the question of reforming the political institutions agreed in 1998.

One participant expressed her belief in her generation to make positive change to the local economy in Derry and gave examples of successful local youth-led businesses. Notably, this participant was choosing to stay in Northern Ireland despite receiving opposite advice from the older generation. She said:

My parents would always say ‘get yourself out of here’, they don’t think it can be fixed but I think my generation can change that ‘get out’ narrative and it’s already happening in Derry, like there are so many young people behind successful businesses like Storefront, Sass and Halo, Han, and it is amazing to see. So I think my generation actually want to make the best of Derry, like we are so passionate about where we come from and we have to use that as a force for good. (Interview 2, female, republican)

Other participants admitted that the societal divisions and political stalemates created a temptation to leave Northern Ireland, but their desire to make positive change in the region for the sake of future generations prevented them from doing so. One participant classified themselves as a ‘youthful optimist’ and continued by saying: ‘I think I can make change at some stage. I know other people are like, that’s not my issue, but I think everyone can and should do something’ (Interview 19, male, unionist). Other participants shared this sentiment. For instance:

For a really long time I wanted to leave, I wanted to move away and just ditch it all, I just hated everything about the place. But if I move away I’ll be the one responsible for the fact that my sister’s kids are still living in Northern Ireland that’s divided with loads of problems and no government you know, so I just don’t really want to have that on my shoulders. I don’t want to be sitting in some other country enjoying myself and then think you know, everyone else is still at home kind of suffering. (Interview 14, male, loyalist)

The following person is motivated by the belief that they might be able to make even one small positive change to people’s everyday lives, giving the example of securing an increase in rural bus services:

I am dying to get out. But then at the same time there is change I want to make, I want to be able to say someday I made the place better, whether that’s the education system or that I got a bus after 6 p.m. in South Armagh it would be worth it. So I feel this responsibility to do something good, you know? (Interview 18, male, republican)

Regarding reconciliation, it was noted above how some interviewees felt that reconciliation kept society focused on the past. But a majority believed it was a means to escape repeating the past: ‘Extremism is bleeding down into my generation and younger with the likes of Saoradh [violent republican group] in Londonderry. Until people stop repeating mistakes of the past reconciliation will still be relevant’ (Interview 4, male, unionist). Similarly, this respondent who, interestingly, was quoted above as saying they saw no future for themselves in Northern Ireland, remarked: ‘Working on reconciliation will allow the new generation to steer the country in the right direction. It will teach them the importance of remembering the past but as well how to move on from any lingering bitterness’ (Interview 26, male, unionist).

Frustration-ambition was also exhibited in reflections on the question – much debated in Northern Ireland amid the political impasses – of reforming the power-sharing institutions in a way that might make them more stable. For many, the achievement of the Agreement in 1998 was undeniable but they felt that it was of its time, and they had few qualms about changing it. For example:

Yes it is important, but it is also outdated. It was the best at the time, but now we can do better. We’re allowed to revise it and I think we should. (Interview 18, male, republican)

It was a tool for a time and place and we’re in a different place now. (Interview 19, male, unionist)

I hope that it will be replaced in the future by a better document. It’s not a criticism of it, it’s just times change and we learn and need different things. (Interview 10, female, nationalist)

Thus, there was a feeling that the Agreement – a creature of the past – could in fact constrain the future if it remained unaltered. As one person said, the Agreement ‘ended the conflict but it shouldn’t write our future’ (Interview 25, male, nationalist).

Discussion

The opening theoretical review noted the contradictory socio-political forces at work during a peace process, as well as the subjectivity of experiences of time. The findings illustrate how the mixed ‘speeds’ of change during the peace process appear to influence people’s sense of where Northern Ireland is ‘in time’ and their generation’s relationship with the conflict and peace process. These evaluations are interwoven with people’s interpretation of their own life stories. If Northern Ireland remains ‘in the past’, then they do not feel that they personally will have a ‘bright future’ if they spend their future lives there.

What do these clashing temporalities mean for the continuance of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, or indeed, for the project of ‘perpetual peacebuilding’ (Paffenholz, 2021) advocated for all conflict-affected societies? One way to explore this is with reference to the social and epistemological significance of both the existence of generations, and generational change. While there are various debates in relation to the sociology of generations, we may outline some broad applications for peace processes drawing mainly on Karl Mannheim’s (1952) still-seminal essay on ‘the sociological problem of generations’. He construed a generation as a group of people who are influenced by prevailing historical circumstances during their youth. That experience predisposes ways of thought and behaviour, but does not preclude diversity within a generation, such as liberal and conservative movements responding to the same political or economic conditions (for discussions of Mannheim, see Bristow, 2016; Connolly, 2019; Pilcher, 1994).

The findings show that the young people possessed a ‘generational consciousness’ (Edmunds and Turner, 2002: 4), evident in their frequent use of the category of generation to make sense of their experience. They voiced opinions on the views, actions and responsibilities of their generation and the older, ‘conflict generation’; they reflected on the notion that they are a ‘peace generation’; they spoke of the needs of future generations. As Pilcher (1994: 486) writes, temporality and generational consciousness are interrelated: ‘Conceptions of time are central to the variety of ways in which generation is used in everyday language, including in terms of locating persons within historical time and as a marker of time past, time future and historical progression.’ It has been argued by Mannheim and others that generational consciousness arises among cohorts who experience dramatic or accelerated social change, or trauma such as war (Edmunds and Turner, 2002). It may be expected that a transition out of conflict can serve this function, imprinting an awareness of living in an historical period that is markedly different from a preceding era.

At the same time, generations have been described as ‘discursive formations’ in the Foucauldian sense; generations are ‘produced by a number of institutional and noninstitutional means, which range from academia to the media and many other forms of labelling’ (Aboim and Vasconcelos, 2014: 177). Thus, the interviewees’ invocation of generations also indicates their cognisance of a dominant narrative that people coming of age in 21st-century Northern Ireland represent a novel ‘peace generation’, even if they reject that labelling. The intra-generation diversity that is emphasised by Mannheim is evident not only in the differing political attitudes of the sample, but in interviewees’ references to their contemporaries (who rioted or were sectarian) whom they believed did not want to move on from the past.

As noted above, the biological cycle of life and death means that accumulated culture is always encountered afresh, with implications for that accumulated culture. Generational change ‘facilitates re-evaluation of our inventory and teaches us both to forget that which is no longer useful and to covet that which has yet to be won’ (Mannheim, 1952: 294). We may now begin to understand the challenges facing a peace process when it passes into the hands of a new generation. The four varieties of peace time may be understood as interpretations of the generational inheritance of peace.

Thus, those who feel a temporality of detachment from the past believe that the peace process is only relevant to the previous generation. Those who feel a fatalist temporality of being trapped in the past believe they are being offered a peace process that is ineffective and unsuited to their generation. Those who feel the temporality of appreciation for living in a bright future believe they are inheriting the peace process as a permanent, ongoing, and valid project. Those who experience the temporality of frustration-ambition believe they are inheriting peace as a flawed project but one that, in their own hands, may fulfil its potential in the future, benefitting their generation and the next generation.

Appreciation and frustration-ambition understand peacebuilding as transcending generations. This is in line with those who regard a peace process as a permanent platform of change, negotiation, and adaption (De Coning, 2018; Lederach, 2005; Paffenholz, 2021). Significantly, the openness of many interviewees to reforming the Agreement illustrates Mannheim’s point that accumulated culture and knowledge may not only be rejected or assimilated, but modified, in the contact with a new generation. Fatalism and detachment hold a more time-limited understanding of peacebuilding as something that is attempted for a period of time and then the next generation moves on.

For policy makers and practitioners who are concerned with maintaining public support for peacebuilding over the long term, fatalism and detachment are obvious challenges. Hope is needed to initiate and sustain any social change, and accordingly, as Brewer (2022) writes, the public cultivation of hope is usually, and should be, a policy priority in promoting and managing a peace process. Hope is not only an individual emotion but is ‘deeply sociological’ (Brewer, 2022: 79) because it is shaped by cultural values and is affected by social conditions and can also affect social conditions. Civil society groups – faith, business, arts, sport – can create social and cultural spaces that promote the envisioning of a better future (the episode of Derry Girls discussed at the outset may be an example). Promoting motivational hope of course is the goal of the future-facing rhetoric of peace processes. At the same time, concrete measures must be taken to address the reasons people remain ‘in the past’, whether personal trauma, unaddressed grievance, or political disaffection.

Nevertheless, it must be said that cultivating hope in a permanent peace process – a journey that never finally arrives at its ideal destination – is a difficult task. It is easier to portray peacebuilding as a series of time-bound targets, or to persuade the public to invest in the aspiration that their children will not face any residual conflict legacies. As Paffenholz (2021) notes, peace as a permanent project requires entirely new terms, approaches and concepts. Furthermore, social-psychological interventions towards optimism must be accompanied by real, and ongoing, improvements in people’s social and material conditions. For example, the Everyday Peace Indicators project, based on data from communities in several sub-Saharan countries, found that ‘those communities that were further away in time from violent conflict . . . predominantly focused their indicators on socioeconomic factors’ (Firchow and Mac Ginty, 2017: 22). In other words, the more time passed, the more important became positive peace, as opposed to negative peace, indicators to ordinary people.

This was also borne out in the present research. Even though most of the young people in the present study understood that their lives would have been more difficult during ‘the Troubles’, their expectations of peace were higher than simply the absence of violence. Indeed, it is interesting that the four varieties of peace time did not map onto traditional political divisions. Frustration about job prospects and political dysfunction and sectarianism, concerns for safety and security, as well as appreciation for the peace process and feelings of civic duty to make society better, were felt by nationalists, republicans, unionists, loyalists and non-aligned interviewees. This suggests that despite ongoing disagreement and uncertainty about the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, and different political aspirations in the sample, there exists a broadly shared consensus on the kind of everyday dividends people should expect from peace.

Conclusion

This study set out to understand how young people in Northern Ireland saw their own lives in the context of over 20 years of ‘peace processing’ in the region. We spotlighted the motif of time in their reflections, and how this indicated revealing disjuncture, and at times, convergence, with the ideal peace process continuum of dark past–present-bright future. These various combined experiences of time, and interpretations of socio-political change, we call peace time. Peace time is related to their generational consciousness, since they articulated where they, and Northern Ireland, were ‘in time’ by referring to how they believe their generation is related to an older generation, and future generations. By applying concepts of time and generations, the article offers a research approach that can be applied to any transitional society. A lens of temporality can reveal the interrelationship between people’s interpretations of their personal life stories and the socio-historical circumstances of the peace process, but also the implications of generational change for peacebuilding. In this research, the endeavour of perpetual peacebuilding was grasped positively by some interviewees, while others found peacebuilding to have failed or to be dated. Nevertheless, it was clear that there was both an openness to adapting the Agreement to present and future circumstances, as well as mostly shared everyday hopes and expectations of peace.

In February 2024, power-sharing was restored in Northern Ireland after a two-year absence due to political disagreement. One politician remarked that it was the day after Groundhog Day – the day on which, in the film of the same title, a man repeats the same day over and over (Matthew O’Toole quoted in Roberts, 2024). This was another expression of peace time. It is unclear to what extent politicians are aware of how creating recurring political crises and engaging in similar disputes again and again foster fatalism among the public, fatalism that seeps into how individuals view their own lives and futures, especially young people. Therefore, in terms of policy and peacebuilding practice in any society, the study shows the long-term and ongoing importance of: first, portraying peacebuilding as a never-ending, multigenerational endeavour; second, continually pursuing tangible improvements in people’s everyday lives; and third, fostering a sense of agency among young people that they can shape their own and their society’s future.