Cities carry memories unevenly. Some are embalmed in museums and murals, converted into official narratives and anniversary speeches. Others survive as habits: the way a street is crossed after dark, the instinctive knowledge of which road belongs to whom, the inherited awareness that certain accents sound safer than others depending upon where one happens to stand.
What Belfast remembers is not always what Belfast knows.
Northern Ireland’s peace process transformed the constitutional architecture of conflict with extraordinary success. It brought adversaries into government, normalised institutions that had once seemed impossible, and rendered increasingly illegitimate forms of violence that had dominated public life for three decades.
Yet peace agreements alter incentives more readily than they alter dispositions. They can change the rules of the game without entirely dissolving the social grammars through which communities understand danger, belonging, and exclusion.
We need to bear that in mind when reflecting on what has been happening in Belfast.
The disturbances do not represent a straightforward continuation of the conflict between unionism and nationalism that defined Northern Ireland for much of the twentieth century. Their immediate objects are different. Their rhetoric is different. Their ideological vocabulary is increasingly drawn from a transnational reservoir of anti-immigrant grievance, demographic anxiety, and digitally mediated resentment.
Yet anyone familiar with Belfast’s history could scarcely fail to notice the peculiar familiarity of the scenes themselves: masked youths moving through predominantly Loyalist districts; roads blocked and neighbourhoods defended; houses identified as belonging to outsiders; families fleeing in the night as their homes burned.
The resemblance is not one of political equivalence, but of form.
One of the enduring temptations of commentary on Northern Ireland has been the desire to identify decisive endings. The Good Friday Agreement, in this telling, marked the moment at which ancient sectarian hatreds finally yielded to liberal modernity. The old quarrels were settled, or at least domesticated. Constitutional questions replaced paramilitary campaigns. The future, however imperfectly, had arrived.
Reality has always been less accommodating.
Even during the most optimistic years of the peace process, Belfast remained a city organised around boundaries. Peace walls multiplied rather than disappeared. Residential segregation persisted. Educational systems remained largely divided. Territorial markings continued to designate spaces as Loyalist or Republican through flags, murals, painted curbstones, and commemorative displays.
The violence subsided dramatically; the cartography of identity endured.
This persistence matters because conflict is not simply a matter of ideology. It is also a matter of practice. Communities learn techniques of vigilance. They develop repertoires through which threat is identified and managed. They cultivate local knowledge concerning who belongs and who does not. Such habits can outlast the conflicts that first produced them.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term habitus to describe the sedimentation of social experience into durable dispositions, ways of perceiving and acting that become second nature precisely because they no longer require conscious reflection. We do not need to embrace Bourdieu’s entire theoretical apparatus to recognise something similar at work in Belfast.
Generations raised amid insecurity acquired practical competencies suited to a divided city. The ability to read symbols quickly. Sensitivity to neighbourhood boundaries. The assumption that territory requires active defence. These were not merely ideological commitments; they were survival skills.
What happens to such dispositions once the original antagonism recedes?
The recent disturbances suggest one answer. The object of hostility shifts while the underlying grammar remains available for redeployment. Reports from the affected neighbourhoods describe a pattern that extends beyond spontaneous outrage. Houses believed to accommodate migrants were singled out. Streets became sites of surveillance and enforcement. Residents deemed external to the community found themselves transformed into visible embodiments of danger.
Whether particular participants were motivated by organised racism, opportunistic criminality, youthful excitement, or generalised anger matters less than the broader social logic into which these actions cohered. The neighbourhood became something to be defended. Outsiders became something to be expelled.
This is what might be called the micropolitics of territoriality. Large political narratives often obscure these smaller mechanisms. Constitutional disputes concern sovereignty, representation, and legitimacy. Territorial micropolitics concern front gardens, alleyways, and apartment blocks. They unfold at the scale of everyday life.
Who moves into the vacant house at the end of the street? Who shops at the local convenience store? Which languages are heard on the bus? Which children attend the neighbourhood school?
These questions appear banal until conditions of uncertainty transform them into political flashpoints. During the early phases of the Troubles, territorial control frequently operated through precisely such practices. Historians continue to debate terminology and causation, but there is little disagreement about the role of intimidation, forced displacement, and the policing of communal boundaries.
Violence often functioned not simply to kill opponents but to reorder space itself. Streets acquired confessional identities. Families relocated. Mixed areas diminished. The city was rewritten through countless local acts of exclusion.
The burning of houses occupied by migrant families inevitably recalls that history, not because Sudanese asylum seekers occupy the same political position once held by Catholic residents, but because the method itself remains legible within Belfast’s collective memory.
Fire carries symbolic weight in Northern Ireland. To burn someone out is to signal that their presence violates the neighbourhood’s moral geography. It transforms residence into trespass.
There is a tendency among liberal commentators to treat such developments as irrational eruptions against the inevitable tide of pluralism. From this perspective, racism appears as an atavistic residue destined for eventual extinction through demographic change and civic education.
This interpretation offers comfort because it locates the problem in the prejudices of backward individuals rather than in broader structures of insecurity. Yet the geography of the disturbances points toward a more complicated reality.
Many of the neighbourhoods implicated in the recent violence are places shaped by prolonged economic abandonment. Deindustrialisation devastated the traditional economic foundations of working-class Loyalism. Shipbuilding declined. Manufacturing contracted. Stable forms of employment disappeared.
What emerged in their place was an uneasy combination of precarious labour, welfare dependence, fragmented political representation, and persistent cultural defensiveness.
In other words, the peace dividend arrived unevenly.
This observation is not intended as exculpation. Material hardship does not mechanically produce racism. Most people experiencing deprivation do not burn down their neighbours’ homes. The point instead is that insecurity creates demand for explanatory frameworks capable of rendering diffuse anxieties intelligible. Communities experiencing social dislocation frequently seek narratives identifying who has benefited, who has been favoured, and who no longer belongs.
Contemporary anti-immigrant politics provides precisely such narratives. The themes are familiar across the North Atlantic world. Housing shortages are a consequence of migration rather than of decades of policy failure. Stagnant wages become products of foreign competition rather than weakened labour institutions.
Declining public services become evidence of preferential treatment for newcomers rather than chronic underinvestment. The resulting politics does not abolish older identities so much as reorganise them around new antagonisms.
Northern Ireland offers fertile terrain for this transformation because its political culture has long been organised around questions of demographic vulnerability.
Loyalism emerged historically from a perception of communal precariousness: a determination to maintain political and cultural dominance within a territory whose population trends threatened established hierarchies. Its narratives frequently emphasised siege, betrayal, and abandonment. That’s why Loyalism can adapt readily to contemporary fears concerning immigration and cultural displacement.
What is striking is the extent to which global and local repertoires now intersect. Social media circulates replacement theories formulated elsewhere. Anti-immigrant entrepreneurs import slogans and visual styles from Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. Digital ecosystems collapse distance, allowing grievances developed in Essex, Dresden, or Arizona to acquire local expression in north Belfast.
These imported narratives achieve traction only insofar as they attach themselves to preexisting social forms. The international language of demographic threat becomes persuasive because Belfast already possesses an inherited vocabulary of territorial defence.
This convergence complicates conventional understandings of post-conflict transition. The dominant literature surrounding Northern Ireland’s peace process often emphasised institutional design. Secure elite bargains, proportional representation, cross-community consent mechanisms, and carefully calibrated constitutional ambiguity would channel antagonism away from violence and toward politics.
By most measurable standards, this approach succeeded. The scale of bloodshed diminished dramatically. Armed organisations demobilised, however incompletely. Political disagreements became matters for assemblies rather than funerals.
What institutional arrangements proved less capable of addressing were the affective infrastructures of conflict.
Fear possesses a remarkably long half-life. Communities organised for decades around vigilance do not simply forget how vigilance operates. Peace walls reassure precisely because they preserve distinctions the wider settlement ostensibly seeks to transcend. Under such conditions, the disappearance of one enemy does not lead to the disappearance of enmity itself.
This possibility haunted some of the more perceptive observers of the peace process from the beginning. They worried about freezing identities rather than transforming them, rewarding communal entrepreneurs while leaving deeper patterns of separation intact. Stability achieved through mutual vetoes and demographic accounting could contain antagonism without necessarily cultivating solidarity.
There is an uncomfortable lesson here for liberal societies more generally.
The aspiration underlying much contemporary discourse on diversity assumes that contact naturally produces cosmopolitanism. As societies become more heterogeneous, the inherited prejudices of their inhabitants are supposed to diminish. But diversity experienced amid scarcity often generates different outcomes.
The question is not merely whether populations change. It is a question of whether institutions capable of mediating those changes can prevent uncertainty from becoming resentment.
Northern Ireland’s tragedy has always involved the intimate scale at which large political questions became lived realities. Constitutional arrangements manifested themselves in school admissions, employment opportunities, marriage patterns, and postal addresses. The border ran through kitchens and playgrounds long before it appeared on maps. Perhaps this is why the recent disturbances feel so unsettling.
Images from the racist disturbances resist easy categorisation. They do not belong comfortably within the familiar narratives through which the Troubles are remembered. They are neither Republican campaigns nor Loyalist feuds. Yet neither are they simply interchangeable with anti-immigrant riots elsewhere in Europe.
For all the extraordinary achievements of the post-Agreement era, Belfast continues to inhabit a landscape marked by visible and invisible borders. It has learned how to manage conflict without breaking the habits conflict leaves behind.
The danger lies not in believing that history repeats itself exactly. History rarely affords such conveniences. The danger lies in assuming that societies emerge from violence as blank slates. More often than not, old forms await new content. The choreography survives the music.
A Belfast that once learned to divide itself to survive now faces the more difficult task of unlearning those divisions altogether. Until it does, the embers of one conflict will continue to provide ample tinder for others.
Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.
