Peaceful Spaces? “Walking” through the New Liminal Spaces of Peacebuilding and Development in North Belfast

Abstract

Strategies of international peacebuilding depend on the creation of secure, manageable spaces that embody the norms of intervening actors. This article examines attempts by governmental and international donors to create pockets of “peaceful space” in Belfast’s city center, and their effects on the surrounding neighborhoods of north Belfast. Using the technique of an ethnographic walk, we examine several key sites that reflect how the creation of “peaceful spaces” has also generated distinctive “outsides” shaped by interfaces, enclaves, and complex patterns of conflict. By reframing these spaces as a result rather than solely a precondition of peacebuilding activities, this article challenges the assumption that conflict degrades the spaces in the outside areas of “peaceful space” and that peacebuilding strategies ameliorate them. Instead, we argue that development and peacebuilding strategies have generated deterritorialized spaces whose status and ownership is indeterminate, in which the right of access and use is unclear, and in which the conditions created by constant and always incomplete transformation are used to justify intensive securitization and modes of control.