Displaced Without Moving: Loyalism and Democratic Haunting in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This chapter looks at local resistance to the democratic peace process in Northern Ireland. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a UVF-area in Belfast, it clarifies how parts of the country’s more marginal Protestant population experience and react to the political changes that have followed in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Though people principally support both peace and democracy, there is a growing fear in some Loyalist circles that their ‘community’ as becoming marginalised by the current developments and the political negotiations involved. The chapter shows how this experience of loss and increasing political marginalisation ties into a larger history of perceived decline, and how this conjuncture has given rise to a range of protests and riots in which Loyalists have sought to publicly oppose, what they see as the negative consequences of the otherwise positive democratic process.