by Kate Laverty
Sitting today (21.9.26) at the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council’s Making A Difference 2026: Building Belonging conference, I have found myself returning to a deceptively simple question: what do we actually mean when we say that Northern Ireland is at peace?
It is an important question because we have become accustomed to measuring peace through what is no longer happening. Fewer shootings. Fewer bombings. Fewer deaths. Less overt political violence. These are extraordinary achievements and should never be diminished. The first Northern Ireland Peace Index, published this month by Queen’s University Belfast and the Institute for Economics and Peace, gives empirical weight to that progress. Between 2019 and 2025, measures of what researchers describe as Negative Peace — the absence of violence and fear of violence — improved significantly. Yet the structures and relationships associated with Positive Peace improved only marginally.
That distinction matters enormously. Because the absence of violence is not necessarily the presence of peace.
Northern Ireland knows this perhaps better than most places. We can remove the gun without removing the fear. We can stop the riot without addressing the alienation that preceded it. We can construct political institutions while communities continue to experience poverty, exclusion, sectarianism, racism and disconnection. We can become remarkably successful at preventing conflict from becoming violent while remaining much less comfortable with conflict itself.
And perhaps this is where nonviolence has something important to offer the next stage of peacebuilding.
Nonviolence is not the avoidance of conflict. It is a methodology for entering conflict differently.
That distinction is critical. Too often, nonviolence is understood as passivity: being reasonable, remaining calm, avoiding confrontation or simply refusing to retaliate. But serious traditions of nonviolence demand considerably more than restraint. They require people to confront injustice, expose harm, challenge unequal power and refuse to accept conditions that diminish human dignity.
Passivity asks us to endure what is wrong. Nonviolence asks us to confront what is wrong without surrendering the humanity of those with whom we are in conflict. That is a much more demanding proposition.
It requires us to develop the capacity to remain in difficult conversations rather than retreating from them. It requires dialogue that is capable of holding disagreement, rather than dialogue whose success is measured by everyone leaving the room comfortable. It requires de-escalation without silencing legitimate anger. It requires restorative approaches that take harm seriously while refusing to believe that punishment and exclusion are the only meaningful forms of accountability.
And it requires reconciliation to mean considerably more than people learning to be polite to one another. One of the challenges for peacebuilding in Northern Ireland may therefore be that we have occasionally confused managing conflict with transforming it. Conflict management asks how we prevent a situation deteriorating. Conflict transformation asks a deeper question: what is producing this conflict, and what needs to change?
That takes us beyond the immediate argument and into questions of relationships, identity, power, inequality, history and belonging. It asks us to look not only at the people standing on opposite sides of an interface, but at the social conditions surrounding them. It asks why particular communities continue to experience disadvantage; why some young people experience limited routes towards power and recognition; why racism and sectarianism remain capable of mobilising anger; and why confidence in political and public institutions can remain fragile even decades after a peace agreement.
The Peace Index (https://nipi.economicsandpeace.org/) makes that challenge particularly stark. Northern Ireland’s reduction in violence is significant, yet the underlying foundations necessary to sustain peace have moved much more slowly. The research also identifies hate crime as the only Negative Peace indicator to have deteriorated between 2019 and 2025, increasing by 21.5 per cent.
That should make those of us involved in peacebuilding uncomfortable. Not despairing. But uncomfortable. Because discomfort is sometimes where serious peacebuilding begins.
It requires us to ask whether some of our established approaches remain sufficient for the society Northern Ireland is becoming. The Community Relations Council itself has recently supported reflection on whether community-relations practice needs to respond differently to contemporary experiences of identity, belonging and division. That conversation includes sectarianism, but can no longer be confined to the traditional binary understanding of community relations.
Our communities are changing. The forms through which fear and hostility are expressed are changing. The spaces in which conflict develops have changed. Social media can amplify grievance long before it appears on a street. Racism intersects with older territorial and sectarian divisions. Economic exclusion sits alongside questions of cultural identity. Trauma passes through families and neighbourhoods while new generations inherit conflicts they did not create.
Peacebuilding must therefore remain capable of changing too.
This is why I increasingly think that one of the most important capacities we can develop is not the capacity to eliminate disagreement, but the capacity to stay in relationship through disagreement.
That is different. It means teaching young people that conflict is not itself a failure. It means helping communities distinguish between anger and violence. It means creating spaces where people can speak honestly without humiliation becoming the currency of debate. It means being capable of saying, I believe this is wrong. I will oppose it. I will organise against it. I will challenge you on it — but I will not require your destruction in order to prove the legitimacy of my position.
That is the discipline of nonviolence. And there is something deeply relevant within it for Northern Ireland. Our peace process taught the world something extraordinary: political violence that once appeared intractable did not have to remain inevitable. But perhaps the work before us now is more dispersed and, in some respects, more difficult to see. It sits in youth clubs and schools, community organisations and workplaces, neighbourhoods and interfaces. It appears in conversations about migration, flags, language, poverty, policing, constitutional futures and who belongs.
The next stage of peace may not always look like peace negotiations. Sometimes it will look like creating the conditions in which people who profoundly disagree can remain in the same room. Sometimes it will mean restorative work after harm has occurred. Sometimes it will mean challenging structural inequality. Sometimes it will mean refusing racism or sectarianism when silence would be easier. Sometimes it will mean recognising the anger of a young person not simply as behaviour to be controlled, but as information about the world they are experiencing. And sometimes peacebuilding will mean having the courage to permit conflict because genuine transformation cannot occur where difficult truths are permanently suppressed.
The theme of today’s CRC conference is Building Belonging. That feels particularly significant. Belonging cannot simply mean inviting people into structures that remain unchanged. Genuine belonging asks whether people possess voice, agency and power once they arrive. The conference itself is deliberately creating space not simply to celebrate peacebuilding practice but to examine its future direction, including through work on community resilience, youth and identity, inclusion and courageous conversations.
And, when approached through the discipline of nonviolence, a place from which something different can emerge. The absence of violence gave Northern Ireland the possibility of peace. The challenge now is to build the relationships, institutions and social conditions that allow peace to become something more than an absence.