Belfast. Peace by Piece.
The city of Belfast offers a window into understanding how groups interact with the institutions without a secure social footing from years of residence. The devolved, yet federal nature of the Northern Ireland state results in immigration largely controlled from London, resulting in an even wider gap between the immigrant populations in residence and the local authorities who are far more preoccupied with the bi-communal politics of the divided city. One of the largest migrant populations today is the Polish community whose political activity is more diffuse and are frequently seen to have "one foot in Poland." Those areas of core interaction focus on employment and education in the here and now, rather than action to secure community representation in the future. Still, the economic tensions around housing and labour are significant in a developing economy emerging from years of conflict and present unique challenges for immigrant newcomers.
Institutional Setting
The city of Belfast operates within a devolved political system through the Northern Ireland institutions within the UK. As such most of the policy around immigration is made at the Federal level and as Northern Ireland itself operates in a highly centralized fashion, very little authority is devolved down to the urban centres.
However, in recent years the City of Belfast has stepped up in terms of creating more inclusive city-spaces. Much of this is an effort to bridge the communal divides between the Protestant and Catholic populations, however it has a knock-on effect of providing diverse access points to policy-making around the use of public space in the city limits.
Belfast city council has also more recently taken up city-level studies to present the NI Assembly in terms of advising how to best meet the needs of the diverse urban population (Belfast, 2007).
Diversity Setting
Belfast's diversity setting, by virtue of the Westminster-based institutions and the centralist Northern Ireland institutions, largely emphasizes integrationist policy when concerned with ethnic newcomers, in contrast to the starkly accommodationist institutions which are constructed for the Protestant and Catholic communities. The emphasis on immigrants as individuals rather than communal groups functions via promotioin of a "Northern Ireland" identity.
The "Good Relations" model, which institutionalizes the policy of accomomodation, effectively relegates all ohter minority communities to the Protestant-Catholic binary (Garvey & Stewart, 2015).
Recent Presentations/Publications
Twietmeyer, Sam. 2022. “Good Relations and Exclusive Tensions: Immigrant and migrant contestation in the city of Belfast” 26th Annual World Convention, Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), May 4-7, 2022.
There is currently very little research on how the Protestant and Catholic divides in Belfast, Northern Ireland (NI) affect and are affected by the influx of migrant or “newcomer” communities. This is largely due to the comparatively recent rise in immigration to NI and, relatedly, the comparative size of the immigrant communities in question. Moreover, the state structures and policy regarding these communities is relatively new or even non-existent. The majority of the discourse on immigration in NI concerns services provision, including health, education, and security, highlighting religion and language as key areas of interest. In terms of state structures, most institutional arrangements, both formal and informal, are designed around the Protestant-Catholic divide. For example, the “Good Relations” model which provides a strictly accommodationist approach to NI organisations and services and interprets all other societal and ethnic tensions in NI as secondary to the key binary of Protestant and Catholic. Simultaneously, the majority of NI politicians, including councillors at the city-level, prefer an individual-based integrationist approach to minorities. Newcomers are thus either adversely affected or outright ignored. This paper presents a framework and initial research for an in-depth study of migrant mobilization in the city of Belfast to address the question: How do ethnic newcomers assert political agency, if at all, in the divided city of Belfast?