Building Peace and Good Relations Amidst the Retreat from Multiculturalism?

 

Dr Shannon Doherty is a Research and Campaigns Worker with the Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ) and North West Migrants Forum (NWMF)

In 2024 she completed a PhD at Ulster University "All of My Problems are Related to Language": Assessing the linguistic needs of refugees and asylum seekers in Northern Ireland since 2015. A link to the thesis is available at the end of this blog. 

This blog has been released to coincide with Good Relations Week (12th-18th October 2026)

Introduction

Northern Ireland is internationally recognised for its transitional justice and peacebuilding architecture, developed in response to decades of protracted political violence. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement marked a defining historical moment, signalling the end of large-scale conflict and the emergence of a new political settlement. Central to the Agreement was a normative commitment by the British and Irish governments, and by the newly established Northern Ireland institutions, to the “achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, alongside the protection and vindication of human rights for all”.

The Agreement embedded principles of equality, parity of esteem, and cultural recognition. Although largely framed through the lens of a binary ethno-national conflict, it also recognised the linguistic and cultural rights of the “various ethnic communities” contributing to life on the island of Ireland. The Agreement laid the foundations for a more pluralistic understanding of peace grounded in inclusion, dignity, and mutual respect, even if such possibilities were not fully realised in practice.

Culture and Peacebuilding

Research has examined the role of culture in peacebuilding, with attention to how peace is experienced, negotiated, and contested by communities whose identities and needs fall outside dominant post-conflict frameworks. Peacebuilding has tended to prioritise managing sectarian division, often at the expense of addressing intersecting forms of marginalisation, including race, class, religion, and language. As the region has become increasingly diverse, the limitations of this approach have become more visible and consequential.

Figure 1: Lisburn, October 2025 (Photo courtesy of Dr Naomi Green)

More recently, my research has focused on the implications of a wider retreat from multiculturalism that is unfolding alongside the growth of far-right populism across the United Kingdom and Europe. These trends present significant challenges to existing peacebuilding paradigms in Northern Ireland. Persistent sectarianism, spatial segregation, and paramilitary influence have not remained confined to traditional communal binaries but increasingly shape attitudes towards racialised and minoritised communities. Hostility towards ethnic minorities cannot be dismissed as external; it emerges from unresolved legacies of conflict, exclusion, and contested belonging.

Shifting Public Discourse

Through my research at Ulster University and the Committee on the Administration of Justice, I have documented a shift in public discourse as immigration has become a focal point of political anxiety. An increasingly hostile political climate, characterised by securitised narratives and exclusionary rhetoric, contributes to a hardening of societal attitudes towards some of the region’s most vulnerable populations.

Across the island of Ireland, there has been a notable escalation in racist and Islamophobic violence. We have seen three violent outbreaks of racist ethnic cleansing: the August 2024 riots, the Ballymena riots in 2025, and, most recently, the Belfast riots in June 2026, which left hundreds of people destitute and displaced. The growth of online and offline far-right networks, together with the persistent inadequacy of state responses to racist intimidation—including paramilitary involvement in such activities—has normalised these violent outbursts, during which entire sections of cities are brought to a standstill and public infrastructure is disrupted by threats of violence.

Figure 2: Ballymena, June 2025 (author's own)

When political actors provide discursive cover for racist or Islamophobic harm under the guise of “legitimate concerns” about housing, welfare, or access to services, they undermine commitments to universal human rights and the Agreement’s purpose.

If peace is understood as more than the absence of violence, then our peace is incomplete. The continued prevalence of racist hate crime, which now far exceeds sectarian hate crime, together with evidence of paramilitary involvement in racist intimidation, challenges claims that the peace process has fulfilled the aspirations of the Agreement. Diversity is a dividend of our peace, but our structures and institutions have failed to uphold the Agreement’s commitments to achieving tolerance and mutual trust and to vindicating human rights for all within a wider framework of good relations between all communities.

In this context, research that centres lived experience and examines how peace is shaped by intersecting forms of exclusion is essential to understanding post-conflict transformation and to reimagining peace and good relations as a commitment to equality and justice for all.

Dr Doherty's PhD thesis can be found at the following link  All of My Problems Relate to Language