Prospect Magazine May, available at www. Rawnsley, A. London: Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin. The Observer 5 September.
Rentoul, J. London: TimeWarner. Robinson, P. News Letter 20 May. Swain, J. The Sunday Times 24 May. The Times Irish sentences. Thornton, C. Belfast Telegraph 23 May.
Trimble, D. Daily Telegraph 9 April. Ulster Unionist Party. Belfast: UUP, May. Wheatcroft, G. London: Politicos. Whyte, J. White, M. The Guardian 23 June. Download references. I am very grateful to Steve Kettell, the Co-editor of British Politics , for his support in publishing this article. Thank you also to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. None of the above are responsible for any of the arguments expressed in this article.
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. An honourable deception? Br Polit 8, — Download citation. Published : 04 February Issue Date : 01 June Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. House of Commons Hansard, 28 March , column Stewart eds , Contemporary Research on Terrorism , Aberdeen See Donald C.
More generally see Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. David McKittrick, Endgame , Belfast , pp. While British claims that Martin McGuinness asked for their help in ending the war can be treated with some scepticism, in effect this was how events unfolded although with many stops and starts.
Robert Kee, Trial and Error , London For the bombing campaign and the secret negotiations see Dillon, Enemy Within, op. Peter Taylor, Loyalist , London , p.
On the Drumcree crisis see McDonald, op. John Newsinger 1 1. Personalised recommendations. Cite chapter How to cite? There were also high residual values within the realistic threat scale for one item and also for the negative and positive contact scales one item each , and we thus allowed these items to be correlated within factors.
The former practice is recommended against unless there is solid a priori evidence for it, and the latter practice is generally considered more acceptable Kline, , p. This significantly improved the model, eliminating high residuals and improving absolute and relative fit indices e. Figure 6. Empirical fit of structural equation model of the associations between contact, threat, distance, and support for removing the peace walls in North Belfast.
Coefficients are standardized. To simplify presentation, the measurement model is not shown. The final model is shown in Figure 6. The residual analysis showed a few slightly higher values than one would expect from a model with so many parameters, correcting for multiple inference.
However, this seemed to us to be a small deviation, all things considered. Attitudes towards the removal of peace walls 15 replications. We present the detailed results for the complete model as additional material to be archived with this article. As Figure 6 clearly shows, several indirect effects are potentially present in the model. We focused in particular on the indirect effects of positive and negative contact through realistic threat on support for the removal of peace walls.
We formally tested the contribution of these two indirect effects to the overall model by comparing them with an alternate model in which all indirect effects were eliminated by setting the coefficients associating positive and negative contact with realistic threat to zero.
Moderation by community membership Community membership is a potentially important moderator variable for our structural equation model, especially as some research suggests that Protestant residents of Belfast are more opposed to the removal of peace walls than Catholic residents Byrne et al.
We therefore conducted a group analysis of the model shown in Figure 6, using community membership as the grouping variable. Our tests showed non-significant v2diff statistics for configural and loading invariance, but we did find significant statistics for intercepts and means. We concluded that the measurement model fit was sufficiently good for each of the subgroups and comparable.
We also conducted a test of equivalence of regression coefficients across the groups, for which we found a significant v2diff On inspection, we found some differences. We thus conclude that community membership did not substantively moderate the model presented in Figure 6. Moderation of the relationship between physical distance and support for peace wall removal by contact As evident in our proposed structural model see Figure 3 above and as discussed in the above results section, we posited that negative and positive contact might interact with 4 We note, in passing, that the relationship between negative contact and symbolic threat for Catholic respondents may reflect wider struggles over the symbolic landscape of Belfast.
The moderation by negative contact was not significant. In order to understand this effect, we constructed Figure 7 below, which depicts the moderating relationship in terms of the unit-scaled variables, rather than the latent variables, and also by breaking the positive contact variable into tertiles.
The figure shows that support for removing the peace walls is differentially dependent on distance from the closest peace wall across varying degrees of positive contact. It indicates that residents living close to peace wall tend to be more supportive of their removal when they have also experienced high levels of positive intercommunity contact.
We broke the interaction 4 Support for removing the peace walls Positive contact 3 Low Medium High 2 2. Moderation of the relationship between distance and support for removing the peace walls by degree of positive contact. Discussion In their Together: Building a United Community Strategy, the Northern Ireland Executive Office announced that: Removing interface barriers and other structures of division will send out an important message that our society is continuing on its journey from conflict and segregation to peace and reconciliation, but more importantly will bring community benefits.
The elimination of these physical reminders is necessary in progressing as a community and facilitating the reconciliation that has been prevented for so long through division p. However admirable this strategy is in principle, recent research has suggested that in practice: 1 Substantive numbers of residents living in communities most affected by peace walls have lingering reservations about their removal Byrne et al.
Four key themes are worth underlining in this respect. First, as other researchers have highlighted Byrne et al. Participants living closer to peace walls tend to hold more negative attitudes towards their removal. Given the history of peace walls as a mechanism for regulating intercommunity conflict Boulton, , the idea that residents living in their shadow would be more cautious about their removal makes sense.
Positive contact seems to encourage support for removal, and this is because such contact diminishes perceptions of realistic threat. Complementing its well-documented role in reducing intergroup prejudice 5 Stormont is a term used locally to refer to the Northern Irish Government and Assembly.
Negative contact works in the opposite direction. This kind of contact seems to discourage support for peace wall removal, and, again, this is partly because it intensifies perceptions of realistic threat. For this reason, negative contact experiences may also reinforce material structures of segregation in historically divided cities such as Belfast, as well as encouraging wider patterns of intergroup avoidance e. Third, realistic threat proved to be a more important predictor of resistance to peace wall removal than symbolic threat in our study.
That is, when evaluating policies to bring down interface barriers, people are more concerned with personal safety than with threats to their identities, values, world views, or ways of life. In making sense of this result, we would highlight the specific historical and policy context of peace wall removal, which explicitly cues issues of safety and security.
As previous work on the social psychology of intergroup threat has shown, the relative significance of symbolic and realistic threat for specific policy attitudes may vary depending, for example, on cultural context, local norms, and the nature of social categories and relationships e. Finally, our research has some clear applied implications. More specifically, they suggest that interventions designed to cultivate regular positive interactions between communities divided by peace walls must be part of the process of social change, especially if the quality of such contact can be aligned with the facilitating conditions recommended in the wider literature on the contact hypothesis e.
On the other hand, as our moderation analysis has shown, such programs also have the potential to offset the powerful role of proximity in shaping such attitudes. What this analysis suggests see Figure 7 , for instance, is that residents living near peace walls may hold relatively positive attitudes towards their removal, providing that they also experience frequent positive contact across community lines. Unfortunately, the converse is also true. Moreover, as our results suggest, overtly negative contact experiences have the potential to undermine any benefits of positive contact by intensifying realistic threat, even if such experiences occur more rarely see also Barlow et al.
For this reason, implementation of the peace wall initiative should be complemented by measures designed to monitor and reduce negative encounters between communities living in interface areas. Such encounters have been a recurring problem in the past e. In sum, although our findings suggest that positive contact can attenuate the effect of proximity on resistance to peace wall removal, they also suggest that residents living closest to the peace walls generally have the worst contact profile most negative, least positive , experience the most threat, and are the least supportive of removal.
Limitations and future directions In conclusion, we will discuss some limitations of our research and then flag some potential directions for further research.
To begin with, our research comprises a cross- sectional survey and obviously this limits our capacity to make causal claims.
For example, in the present study we have explored the role of contact in moderating the relationship between proximity and attitudes towards the removal of peace walls; however, it would be equally plausible to explore the reverse relationship, treating contact as an independent variable and proximity as a moderator.
Similarly, it is likely that relationship between contact and intergroup threat is bidirectional and historically shifting in a divided city such as Belfast. Consequently, their interrelations with attitudes towards peace walls may be more complex than our structural model implies. For this reason, we would advocate caution when generalizing our findings to other contexts where policymakers are seeking to dismantle material structures of segregation.
For example, the present research suggested that realistic but not symbolic threat was associated with resistance to social change. In other contexts, the desire to preserve intergroup barriers may primarily reflect a drive to maintain symbolic and status-related divisions rather than, for example, concerns over personal or collective safety.
This is a matter for further research. Notwithstanding the need for caution when generalizing our findings to other contexts, we would argue equally that our Belfast case study highlights issues that are comparatively neglected in the social psychological literature.
First, it demonstrates the need to understand better the relationship between intergroup contact, threat, and territorial boundary maintenance at the interface between divided communities. This is a topic that has not, to our knowledge, been the focus of much psychological research. It has the potential to produce novel work at the intersection between social and environmental psychology and to enrich related work on, for example, the effects of living in mixed versus segregated spaces Schmid et al.
Second, our research suggests that understanding the experiences of those living in close proximity to interface boundaries may be particularly important — not least because members of such communities are likely to form the vanguard of both social change and resistance to social change.
That is, such experiences reveal how the embodied and spatial location of residents within the human geography of the city may affect not only their opportunities for intergroup contact, but also the broader patterning of their intergroup and environmental attitudes. If and when the walls come tumbling down, then how will this shape the everyday behaviours of hitherto divided communities in places such as north Belfast? Will residents opt to use pathways, spaces, and facilities that were formerly located on the other side of the wall or will they act as though the barriers are still intact?
Conflicts of interest All authors declare no conflict of interest. Colin Tredoux: Formal analysis, Methodology. Brendan Sturgeon: Data curation, Investigation, Methodology.
Data availability statement The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. References Aberson, C. Positive intergroup contact, negative intergroup contact and threat as predictors of cognitive and affective dimensions of prejudice. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 18, — The nature of prejudice.
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