Struggling lives and symbolic boundaries: Violence, young people and trauma in post-conflict Belfast

Abstract

In Belfast, despite everyone knowing the conventional date that put an end to the Northern Irish conflict, commonly known as The Troubles, many people still suffer from its legacies to this day. In this article, I consider both post-conflict dynamics and contemporary issues in Belfast, focusing in particular on young people. Through a qualitative methodology, and drawing on anthropological concepts such as structural violence, I provide some reflections on the relationship between violence and trauma in this context through the analysis of the ethnographic data collected in a youth centre. This intervention is intended as a potential contribution to the broader literature on the anthropology of trauma and the ethnographies of violence, and on the debate on the transmission of mental distress from one generation to another.