Walls and the Geography of Division
Note: Murals at Glenfada Park, Bogside, Derry, Northern Ireland.
In March 2026, I traveled to Northern Ireland in March 2026, due to a study-abroad experience, that showed me why Northern Ireland is such an especially challenging context for examining social-justice issues. Although armed conflict on the scale that occurred during The Troubles has largely ended in Northern Ireland, the legacies of these conflicts remain in many aspects of people's lives, including the collective emotional responses, political narratives, institutional arrangements, and the day-to-day physical spaces where people live. Each of these contexts creates challenges in understanding and describing the everyday realities of those who currently reside in Northern Ireland. I was struck by how deeply political contention remains ubiquitous throughout the landscape, particularly in how space, memory, and identity are defined and represented. Therefore, I will focus specifically on the theoretical debate surrounding social justice in Northern Ireland. I will articulate Alatout’s (2009) conceptualization of the separation wall in the West Bank as a technological component of governance to analyze peace walls, spatial separation, and social fragmentation in Northern Ireland.
Following Alatout (2009), the wall in the West Bank functions as a technology of governing and an instrument of bio-territorial power, making it a useful lens for examining how the geography of conflict and segregation operates in Northern Ireland. The author claims that while the physical separation barrier in the Palestinian context has been represented and justified in official contexts as being primarily for purposes of security and separation from Israel, it operates more broadly as a type of governmental regime which colonizes everyday life in Palestine (Alatout, 2009). This happens because it controls relationships among bodies, spaces, populations, and territorialities (Alatout, 2009). These mechanisms are complex and interrelated, operating physically and bureaucratically through systems of gates, permits, surveillance, regulations, and differential movement, where the right to move through space depends in part on the biographies of individuals and communities (Alatout, 2009). Similar dynamics operate in the urban walls and Peace Lines in Belfast. Thus, these structures function as a form of spatial governance due to their control over access to space, the development of a sense of belonging and exclusion amongst groups, and their role in maintaining physical division(s) between groups in urban areas (Migeon, 2024).In addition to its function as a technology of governmentality, the Wall in the West Bank is a technological expression of bio-territory; therefore, it provides insight into how geographical expressions of conflict and segregation can be seen at play in Northern Ireland. As the author notes, while the separation barrier in the Palestinian context has officially been represented and justified as a security measure, and thus as a means to separate Israelis from Palestinians, it serves as much broader of a governmental apparatus, one that is involved in the colonization of the everyday lives of people in Palestine (Alatout, 2009). It does this by controlling relationships among bodies, territories, populations, and spaces (Alatout, 2009). The mechanisms for this control are complex and interdependent and are both physical and bureaucratic. Physical forms include gates, permit requirements, surveillance, regulation of movement, etc., whereas bureaucratic aspects involve rights to move through particular spaces based upon individual or community biography (Alatout, 2009). In terms of similarity, similar dynamics exist with regard to the urban walls (Peace Lines) in Belfast. Therefore, these structural elements serve as a form of spatial governance through their ability to influence access to space, to create feelings of inclusion/exclusion amongst groups, and through their continued support for physical divisions between groups within urban settings (Migeon, 2024).
Another central focus of Alatout's (2009) research is how physical separation constructs geographies of conflict and peace. Thus, instead of trying to remove violence, governmentally organized technologies for managing the spatiality of violence and peace also control how these two exist together or apart (Alatout, 2009). Specifically regarding Palestine, Alatout (2009) suggests that the barrier or wall will create "peace", defined narrowly as the lack of violence on the Israeli side of the border, while at the same time increasing levels of disciplinary practices, confinement, and conflict on the Palestinian side. In contrast, spatial conflict in Northern Ireland post-Good Friday Agreement might have ended at large scale, nontheless it has not been a elimination of territorial divisions. Here, the peace lines continue to segregate communities, and many of the mural components and other parts of the built environment continue to symbolize specific interpretations of conflict, peace, and membership/belonging to this geography (Rolston, 2010; Migeon, 2024). Furthermore, Rolston (2010) finds that collective memories and symbolic politics continued to represent significant resources for the republican and loyalist communities in negotiating their respective identities within the context of the peace process. In this sense, walls and memorialized community spaces are part of a kind of managed peace. This spaces spatially regulate direct contact between divided communities; but is important to notice that the deeper conflicts over territory, identity, and memory are still at the basis (Rolston, 2010; Migeon, 2024).
This physical aspect of spatial control is matched by the symbolic aspects of resistance and visual intervention to divide or re-interpret space (Alatout, 2009; Flannery, 2006; Migeon, 2024). According to Alatout, the West Bank Wall does not only act as an impassive barrier and/or unpermeable boundary; graffiti, informal border crossings and all manner of daily routines and activities have transformed it into a location for Palestinian expression of resistance to the Wall and evidence that the Wall can be crossed (Alatout, 2009). Likewise, political murals in Northern Ireland are not just occupying public space but creating the social/political content of public space; they mark off territorial boundaries as well as serve as forms of resistance, identity, solidarity, and communal memory (Flannery, 2006; Migeon, 2024). As such, according to Migeon, murals create politicized spaces out of every day public space and help build narratives about peace/conflict/identity/territory/belonging (Migeon, 2024). In like fashion, Rolston suggests that murals and other symbols of collective memory may function as a bridge between the past and the present, enabling communities to reinterpret their pre-existing political identities in light of changing conditions during the peace process (Rolston, 2010).
Muralism and its transnational aspects illustrate how this connection among memory, place, and resistance is especially apparent. Flannery describes the post-colonial and cross-culturally oriented political imagination of Republican murals as extending beyond the geographical confines of Northern Ireland (Flannery, 2006). Through invoking various international revolutionary struggles such as those of Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, South Africa, Cuba, and Palestine; Republican and Nationalist visual cultures have established nationalistic political discourses and localized them within larger fields of international identity and solidarity (Flannery, 2006). Flannery uses a 1983 Falls Road mural titled "Solidarity between Women in Armed Struggle" to illustrate what he refers to as "cross-border or borderless solidarity" and the lateral imaginative qualities of Republican murals. Rather than creating a direct comparison between the historical experiences of Northern Ireland and Palestine; murals create what Flannery describes as cross-peripheral forms of solidarity where the struggles of disparate groups can be put into dialogue ethically and politically (Flannery, 2006).
In addition to conflicts over physical space, the politics of physical space also relates to conflict about "official" narratives, memories and truths in Northern Ireland (Hegarty, 2004; Lundy & McGovern, 2001) Hegarty (2004) points out that the Law in Northern Ireland operates in an opposite manner than its potential. It is one way victims may be able to seek justice, but on the other hand it is a tool utilized by governments to avoid or deny their alleged breaches of Human Rights. Hegarty describes this phenomenon using her example of the Bloody Sunday tragedy as an illustration of this dynamic through the lens of "Official Denial", particularly with regards to the Widgery Inquiry's findings, which according to Hegarty, functionally cleared the State from all wrongdoing and created distrust in legal processes amongst those affected (Hegarty, 2004). Hegarty views the State's reaction to Bloody Sunday in terms of literal, interpretative, and implicatory denials, illustrating how political and legal institutions are capable of creating authoritative accounts of disputed events (Hegarty, 2004).
Against these official processes of memory production, civil-society organizations, victims’ groups, oral-history initiatives, and community memory projects have created what can be understood analytically as “archives from below” (Lundy & McGovern, 2001; Hackett & Rolston, 2009). Through civil society, Lundy and McGovern also contend that the officially sanctioned memory may be contested. They argue that oral-history archives and memory projects initiated by the local community are all part of a larger politics of memory that enables marginalized voices to raise questions regarding truth, justice, and disclosure within the public sphere (Lundy & McGovern, 2001).
The Ardoyne Commemoration Project represents an example of this form of contestation. The project gathered over 300 interviews with relatives and friends of those killed or injured during the conflict, thus providing the opportunity for participants to tell their stories in their own voice and record the accounts of participants that they felt had either been marginalized or mis-represented (Hackett & Rolston, 2009). In addition, the Dúchas oral history archive located in West Belfast collects testimony from individuals directly impacted by the violence of the conflict. By considering storytellers as the main characters of their own stories, it is possible to link this practice to restoring agency to victims' families and mourning communities (Hackett & Rolston, 2009).
The focus on community and daily-life based agency, also serves as a form of comparison for Alatout's analysis of Palestine. Alatout has documented the ways that informal economies, unauthorized border crossings and other forms of movement that Palestinians use to challenge and subvert the space created by the wall, show how common practices may be used politically to resist the state imposed spatial regime (Alatout, 2009). Similarly, in Northern Ireland, using community-based storytelling allows individuals that are typically viewed as being mainly subject to official histories and accounts of events, to construct themselves as both the storytellers and collective actors in struggles around history, recognition, truth and justice (Lundy & McGovern, 2001; Hackett & Rolston, 2009).
In sum, scholarship on Israel-Palestine and Ireland-Northern Ireland supports the idea that physical barriers, such as walls that divide geographic spaces, also contribute to the formation of political power, social identity, territorial relationships, and daily practices (Alatout, 2009; Migeon, 2024; Flannery, 2006). The Wall in the West Bank is a technology of bio-territorial governance that controls movement, creates distinctions within population groups and reorganizes relationships among bodies, territory, and political authority (Alatout, 2009). On the other hand, in Northern Ireland the presence of Peace Lines, murals with political messages, and contentious forms of community-based memory illustrate how the transition from violence has been negotiated both physically and symbolically in urban environments (Rolston, 2010; Lundy & McGovern, 2001; Migeon, 2024). I believe these examples show that separating individuals and/or groups by material barriers does not automatically eliminate conflict or violence that support building them. At the contrary, walls and the areas around them become locations where the issues of safety, identity, memory, resistance and social jutice are continued to be negotiated (Flannery, 2006; Hackett & Rolston, 2009; Alatout, 2009; Migeon, 2024).
(2) ‘Goodnight, Sisters’ mural commemorates Derry-born journalist and feminist activist Nell McCafferty, while ‘Two Nations, One Struggle’ expresses political solidarity between Irish republican and Palestinian struggles.
(3) The landscape illustrates how sectarian division remains materially embedded in Belfast’s urban geography.
(4) The mural juxtaposes Irish Republican Charlie Hughes and Palestinian activist Leila Khaled alongside the Irish and Palestinian flags, visually expressing the transnational solidarity between Irish Republican and Palestinian political struggles.
(5) Centered on abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the mural commemorates Black struggles against slavery, racial segregation, and apartheid, bringing together figures from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and anti-apartheid movements as part of a broader visual narrative of resistance and liberation.
Hegarty, A. (2004). TRUTH, LAW AND OFFICIAL DENIAL: THE CASE OF BLOODY SUNDAY. Criminal Law Forum, 199–246.
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