Urban restructuring, social economics and violence after conflict

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the spatiality of violence needs to pay attention to the production of space as well as the nature of conflict in post-war conditions. Regimes of violence and how they live on in peace, emphasises the need to see how they are assembled in relation to economic, state and social processes implicated in placemaking. Coercion, control and surveillance are all part of the necessary assemblage of ethnic conflict, and in its aftermath, different forms of violence (or simply the threat of violence) reproduce identarian conflict and simultaneously exploit its reproduction. Liberal and increasingly neoliberal forms of peace fail to connect with the people and places most damaged by conflict and the relationship between poverty, sectarianism and place intensify the conditions for enduring forms of paramilitarism and ultimately violence. The paper draws on Belfast, Northern Ireland to argue that tackling the distinct economic conditions of the most marginal places is a critical but undervalued dimension of violence after peace. The analysis concludes by evaluating the potential of the Social and Solidarity Economy in transitional processes in which the relationship between violence, place and poverty are constitutive of embedded forms of materialist peacebuilding.

KEYWORDS:

• Paramilitarism
• Northern Ireland
• peacebuilding
• social economics
• violence
• DDR

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Emma Elfversson, Ivan Gusic and Kristine Höglund for organising and supporting this special edition and for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of participants at the Spatiality of Violence Workshop at the University of Uppsala, 6th-7th March 2019, on which this paper is based.

Notes

1. Steenkamp, Shadows of War and Peace.

2. Ibid., 359.

3. Ibid., 360.

4. McFarlane, Assemblage and Critical Urbanism.

5. Yiftachel and Ghanem, Understanding ‘Ethnocratic’ Regimes.

6. Murtagh, Social Economics.

7. Björkdahl and Kappler, Peacebuilding and Spatial Transformation.

8. Ibid., 14.

9. Gusic, Relational Spatiality.

10. Unwin, Waste of Space, 12.

11. Purcell, Possible Worlds.

12. Unwin, Waste of Space, 22.

13. Castells, Network Society.

14. See note 11 above.

15. Unwin, Waste of Space.

16. Murtagh, Contested Space.

17. Lefebvre, Right to the City, 173–74.

18. Steenkamp, Shadows of War and Peace, 359.

19. Ibid., 360.

20. Chatterjee, Beyond the Factory.

21. See note 5 above.

22. Venugopal, Neoliberalism as Concept.

23. Latour, Reassembling the Social.

24. McFarlane, Assemblage and Critical Urbanism, 209.

25. McGuirk, et al., Assembling Urban Regeneration.

26. O’Leary and McGarry, Politics of Antagonism.

27. McKittrick et al., Lost Lives.

28. See note 16 above.

29. Nagle, Grassroots Organisations.

30. See note 26 above.

31. O’Brennan, Shared Interdependent Past.

32. Hayward, Irish Border.

33. Hoey, Dissident and Dissenting Republicanism.

34. See note 1 above.

35. Vorrath, What Drives Post-war Crime.

36. Gallaher, After the Peace.

37. McGlinchey, Unfinished Business.

38. O’Brennan, Requiem for a Past.

39. Cadwallader, Lethal Allies.

40. Jamieson and McEvoy, State Crime by Proxy.

41. Tomlinson, Risking Peace.

42. See note 37 above.

43. Dwyer, Expanding DDR.

44. Shirlow, Mythic Rights.

45. Ibid., 7.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 7.

48. Nussio, Ex-combatants and Violence.

49. McCall, Brexit, Bordering and Bodies.

50. McEvoy and Shirlow, Reimaging DDR.

51. Joyce and Lynch, Doing Peace.

52. Ibid., 1081.

53. Ibid., 1084.

54. See note 50 above.

55. Coulter and Shirlow, From the Long War.

56. McKeever, Citizenship and Social Exclusion.

57. See note 39 above.

58. See note 51 above.

59. Boland et al., Illegal Geographies.

60. See note 33 above.

61. Ibid., 11.

62. See note 38 above.

63. See note 7 above.

64. See note 29 above.

65. World Bank, Social Innovation for Peacebuilding.

66. Ibid., 11.

67. Khoury and Prasad, Entrepreneurship Amid Constraints.

68. See note 20 above.

69. Satgar, The Solidarity Economy.

70. Morgan, Collective Entrepreneurship.

71. See note 16 above.

72. Grounds and Murtagh, Building Social Economies.

73. Ibid., 22.

74. Nagle, Grassroots Organisations, 3.

75. See note 72 above.

76. Ibid., 25.

77. Sen, Identity and Violence.

78. Based on PSNI, Table 1 * No data between 1973–1981 inclusive.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based on a research project funded by the Northern Ireland Government’s Social Investment Fund.

Notes on contributors

Brendan Murtagh

Brendan Murtagh is a Reader in land use planning at Queen’s University Belfast and has researched and written widely on social economics, contested cities and urban regeneration.

Andrew Grounds

Andrew Grounds is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Queen’s University Belfast working on a research project on social enterprise development and sustainable regeneration in the inner-city.

Philip Boland

Philip Boland is a Reader in Planning at Queen’s University Belfast and has researched and written widely on economic development, identity and place and illegal geographies.

Linda Fox-Rogers

Linda Fox-Rogers is a lecturer in planning at Queen’s University Belfast with a research interest in urban policy, social enterprise development and the ethics of professional practice.