Peace and Conflict Studies have undergone a necessary and overdue spatial turn in the last couple of years. Through it, not only has the category of space as a lens for looking at conflict become more important but also has a new appreciation for (political) geography been found (Björkdahl & Buckley-Zistel, 2016). Yet, I argue that much of this spatial turn tends to remain on an abstract level where space is more conceptualised than experienced. This creates a gap in our perspective on space in peace and conflict. I suggest here that to fill that gap we need to look towards methods that allow us to experience spaces. One such approach would be mapping. While the term itself is far from new to peace and conflict researchers and practitioners with conflict and actor maps being common tools of conflict analysis, geographical mapping is less widely used.
“Mapping is not cartography… mapping allows for visualisations of geographies of meaning.”
The method is, however, well established in disciplines that commonly do field research, meaning first and foremost social and cultural anthropologists but also social geographers and sociologists. It is a flexible and easily adaptable method that can be approached in several ways and yet create complex and multifaceted knowledge.
To state the most important thing first: mapping is not cartography. The idea is not to give an exact rendering of a geographical space in its measured dimensions. Instead, mapping allows for visualisations of geographies of meaning. This is why it is also a great tool to be used in a participatory way. Mappings can be done without the need for literacy or even significant language overlap. Maps are accessible ways of expressing themselves for most people, regardless of ethnicity, age, disability or gender. While in many settings one of the easiest ways to do them is to hand people pen and paper, they can also be scratched in the dirt or built with building blocks or materials found in nature. There is no right way to do them as there is no correct answer. When you ask a group of students to draw their school you will likely receive a different version from each one and in that lies the immense potential for interpretation. What individual persons perceive as important enough to include, what they remember and forget to mention and how they do it (e.g. what colours or materials they use, what is made big or small, shown in detail,…), leave ample room for interpretation. Similarly in a group approach, the discussion regarding the outcome will produce that information. In short, mapping visualises places of importance and meaning (Mikkelsen, 2005).
For the researcher, mapping can also be a good starting point for familiarising oneself with the research environment. It can provide orientation or be a self-assessment as to what stands out to oneself at a certain time in the field research (and potentially how that changes over time). It is also a way to note down and investigate what one has been told by research participants.
The Case of Belfast
The Troubles, the conflict fought in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s up to the Good Friday agreement in 1998, is unique in that – when considering its enormous national and international weight – it happened in a fairly small geographical area. At its centre were two cities, Belfast and Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland. There were a couple of events that also happened in other places such as in various English cities and in Gibraltar but those were comparatively rare.
Belfast itself isn’t a particularly large city and housed around 415,000 inhabitants in 1971 at the start of the Troubles. The numbers dropped to less than 300,000 in 1981 as people left the city for the safer countryside when they could. And even within the city, different parts were affected differently. The lines of conflict had long since been inscribed into the layout of the city by British settler politics and discriminatory practices against the Irish Catholic population concerning housing and work opportunities. This left large parts of in particular working-class neighbourhoods de facto segregated. Major parts of East Belfast were considered protestant neighbourhoods and West Belfast was divided along the now infamous Falls and Shankill Roads while North Belfast was the most mixed neighbourhood with smaller communities or streets belonging to one or the other side and some parts even showing no segregation. The latter, however, was to change quickly after tensions arose when civil rights marches in 1968 were met with police force and soon after the fighting started.
“These structures have become a permanent part of the city and a daily visual reminder that things are not well (yet)”
Now, a good 25 years after the official end of the conflict, many of these demographics still hold true. While the city centre and the often wealthy and international-academic areas of South Belfast seem to have moved on, the conflict still is rather present especially in West and North Belfast. West Belfast is largely considered the epicentre of the Troubles, where it started and where people are affected most with virtually everyone having lost friends and family members to the conflict. It is also where most of the peace walls are. These walls were initially built as temporary means to keep fighters from both sides separate and thus gain some control over the increasingly violent situation in the city. While there are many different installations ranging from basic fences and sheet metal structures to several-meter-high walls built from brick or concrete they all have become a permanent part of the city and a daily visual reminder that things are not well (yet). While there is an ultimate goal of deconstructing the peace walls, those plans from the city are usually met with strong resistance by the ones living in its vicinity. In most places the gates in the walls are still closed every evening and the opening of a new gate is an exercise in trust building every single time. Such segregated living circumstances over more than half a century have, of course, shaped the neighbourhoods even further with daily lives and infrastructure adapting to the increase of closed pathways.
Mapping Segregation
My mapping of in particular West Belfast happened first and foremost through car rides. Several members of the organisation I worked with took me on rides around the neighbourhoods to show me important sites and explain to me the intricacies of living on the interface. Additional information was given during car rides to and from events when tips on good fish and chip shops were mixed with stories about what had happened at particular street corners or in front of a certain building. These tours were substituted by my own visits to large parts of the neighbourhoods on foot and via public transport and by the use of various maps and off-site descriptions.
Interestingly, on traditional city maps the segregation is almost invisible. Even the infamous peace walls at the Shankill/Falls interface can only be guessed when you know where they are and by a few small side roads ending suddenly.
When looking at other aspects, the divide becomes more obvious. To avoid any semblance of favouring one community, the city has adapted a strategy of double infrastructure where when something is built on one side of the wall a similar structure will be built on the other side as well. This accounts for schools but also for public structures like libraries or swimming pools. Also, bus lines in West Belfast strictly adhere to the divide with one going through loyalist communities and one through nationalist ones and from there to the city centre on their respective sides of the wall. To go from one side to the other by public transport, the only way would be to go all the way to the city hall and change lines there. Similarly, when the gates are closed at night, the only way is again to go to the city motorway – which has been strategically built to separate West Belfast from the city centre – and cross sides there.
Beyond these infrastructural reinforcements of division, its existence is also clear where there are no peace walls. In parts of West Belfast a street serves as the demarcation between two neighbourhoods and even though this is a far more subtle border, people are very aware of it. As I was told, you can tell community affiliation by the fact on which side of the road people walk. Convenience of infrastructures will sometimes help to cross these divides as was the case with a shopping mall built in North Belfast. One community there had pressured for a permanently closed gate to be opened as it would give them access to a large road and thus spare them a lot of time on their daily commute but the other side had been reluctant. Only when a large shopping centre was built on the side without road access were people more forthcoming about having the gate opened at least during the day. In other cases, fear and mistrust are too great and people choose daily inconveniences to feel safe in their homes.
Concluding Thoughts
West Belfast is a rather productive example for showing the relevance of understanding the geography of conflicts and how mapping can serve that purpose due to the rather obvious infrastructural challenges and the clear impact they have on people’s lives.
We shape and are shaped by our surroundings and the segregation in West Belfast can easily be identified as a spiral. Stories from elderly inhabitants tell a clear narration of how much more common it used to be to have friends from both communities. The increase in walls and segregated housing has led to a further alienation of the communities that now necessitates initiatives where people come together voluntarily to demystify the estranged other.
Yet this is not to discount people’s fears or the very real purpose the walls serve, since they were built higher and higher over the years to prevent the throwing of explosives. They make assassinations significantly harder by hampering the get-away and quite a few had to be closed again, at least temporarily, during the aftermath of Brexit and the tremendous insecurities it caused in Northern Ireland which led to riots and street fights.
What mapping can do is show us the reality of the people living on the interface. How the divide is inscribed in their lives – and bodies – by how it shapes their day to day. It is thus, despite how we might instinctively associate maps with positivist notions of facts and truths, a means to understand deeply personal stories of living in a not-yet-peace.
References
Björkdahl, A., & Buckley-Zistel, S. (Eds.). (2016). Rethinking peace and conflict studies. Spatializing peace and conflict: Mapping the production of places, sites and scales of violence (1st edition). Palgrave Macmillan.
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