Kate West is one of our three summer interns from Willamette University and a Conversation Ambassador for the Conversation Project at Willamette. Kate is a rising senior majoring in Peace and Justice studies and calls Redmond, OR home. She wrote this blog based on our recent walk through the neighborhoods of North Belfast.

“This past week, we walked along the peace walls in Belfast between the Falls and Shankill Road. At forty-five feet tall, it is three times higher than the Berlin wall once was and has been standing for over twice as long. The formidable barrier divides Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods–two communities that have both shared unthinkable loss and trauma. It represents years of violence, discrimination, and social division; even still, many would like the walls to stay put. For some, it is a marker of safety, a shell that has become a familiar backdrop to daily life, an arm’s length distance from the “other”.

Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the cumulative length of peace walls in Belfast has neither decreased nor stayed stagnant…it has increased. It seems to signal a familiar truth: as the legacy of pain endures, separation is seen as normal, even inevitable. Trust takes an instant to shatter, but a long time to build back. We are grateful to witness and to be in relationship with the heart-forward humans putting the pieces back together. 

Though there is no longer the threat of gunfire on the street or petrol bombs being lobbed over fences on the daily, the violence has in some ways transmuted and taken on a new shape behind closed doors. While the Good Friday Agreement formally ended the ethno-sectarian conflict, the rates of gender-based violence in Ireland are staggering: In 2023, the Police Service of Northern Ireland was called to a domestic violence incident every 16 minutes. Northern Ireland also has the highest suicide rate in the United Kingdom. 

A “post-conflict” society is complex. In what ways do conflicts still linger, even when they are less visible, less measurable? How do we measure peace, and peace for whom? These are the difficult questions and conversations beneath the surface. 

Every day we are engaging in conversations with people who have been bridging divides for years, those who have navigated conflict their whole lives, and those who are deeply invested in the peacebuilding work that remains. Even with the issues that still remain, each story we encounter is a bright light. Northern Ireland is brimming with pride in how much progress has been made in their efforts toward reconciliation, and resilient optimism for the future, especially in the hands of the younger generations. 

The road to peace is bumpy and tender and bruised and most importantly, hopeful. So often, that work starts with: “I see you,” and “I hear you,” and “you are welcome here”.”