The Frontier in the City

Abstract

The ethnonational differentiation that characterizes life in Northern Ireland, dating from the seventeenth-century Plantation, is manifest in the high degree of residential segregation and recurrent violence in the Belfast urban area. In turn, this urban encapsulation of the ethnonational conflict exists in microcosm in the Shankill-Falls area of west Belfast. In our examination of how Protestant and Roman Catholic residents in this small area have responded to their environment, we suggest that the idea of the frontier provides a useful explanatory model for understanding the progressive demise of mutal interactions and the increasing hostility between the two groups over the past fifteen years. Each on the periphery of more secure ethnic heartlands, these residents are shown to be the victims of "multiple peripherality" at local, national, and international scales.