{"id":10034,"date":"2026-09-13T22:55:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T21:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/?p=10034"},"modified":"2026-09-14T09:49:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T08:49:24","slug":"beyond-the-absence-of-violence-building-positive-peace-in-northern-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/beyond-the-absence-of-violence-building-positive-peace-in-northern-ireland\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Absence of Violence: Building Positive Peace in Northern Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/strong> Andrew Thomson and Dominic Bryan from Queen’s University and Paulina Pijacka, Matthieu Lohr and Brett Savill from the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP).<\/strong><\/p>\n

On 2 September 2026, Queen\u2019s University Belfast and the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) published the first Northern Ireland Peace Index (NIPI). The Index provides a new way of understanding peacefulness in Northern Ireland not simply as the relative absence of violence and fear of violence, but by examining the wider social, economic and institutional conditions that sustain peaceful societies.<\/p>\n

The NIPI has two connected purposes. First, it provides a new evidence base for measuring peace. Drawing on the IEP\u2019s Positive Peace methodology, it measures both Negative Peace, the absence of violence and fear of violence, and Positive Peace, the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. The Index tracks change between 2019 and 2025, both across Northern Ireland as a whole and across its eleven Local Government Districts (LGDs). This provides, for the first time, a systematic picture of how different dimensions of peace have changed over time and how peace maps across different parts of Northern Ireland. It also provides a basis for comparing Northern Ireland\u2019s experience with the wider international evidence on peace.<\/p>\n

Second, the Index introduces Positive Peace as a model for peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. The Positive Peace framework offers an evidence-based, forward-looking and systems-oriented lens through which to approach the next phase of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. It recognises that peace is shaped not only by those policies traditionally understood as \u2018peacebuilding\u2019, but also by decisions relating to economic development, education, health, justice, governance, equality and social cohesion.<\/p>\n

This has important implications for policy. The Positive Peace framework provides a way for all parts of government to consider how their policies contribute to the conditions for durable peace. It also offers civil society organisations, public bodies and other agencies a way of understanding their contribution to broader systemic change. In doing so, it expands the policy conversation beyond the traditional focus on security and \u2018good relations\u2019 towards the wider conditions that enable individuals and communities to live in peaceful, prosperous and resilient societies.<\/p>\n

Two Sides to Peace<\/strong><\/p>\n

This research rests on a distinction between negative peace and Positive Peace.\u00a0 Negative peace is the relative absence of violence and the fear of violence. Positive Peace, building on the concept Johan Galtung popularised, is defined by the IEP as the attitudes, institutions and structures that sustain peace. These are the conditions in which people can thrive.<\/p>\n

The best way to think about Positive Peace is through a medical analogy:\u00a0 the absence of illness is not the same as good health.\u00a0 In the same way, the relative absence of violence (negative peace) tells us something important about peace, but not necessarily whether the underlying social, political and institutional conditions are healthy.\u00a0 To carry this analogy even further, the best way to avoid getting sick is to maintain good health; eating well, exercise, strong social relations with others, good mental health, among other things.\u00a0 Likewise, the best way to avoid flare-ups of violence is to ensure social, political and institutional resilience.<\/p>\n

The IEP\u2019s framework for Positive Peace was derived from statistical analysis that the IEP conducted over many years using almost 50,000 economic and social indicators across 163 countries to identify the factors most strongly associated with peaceful and resilient societies.\u00a0 The 8 pillars of Positive Peace were identified through this process and provides an evidence-base on which the authors of the Index built a similar framework for Northern Ireland.\u00a0 The 8 pillars of Positive Peace interact as part of a system.<\/p>\n

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Savvy readers will note that this does not include many of the issues we might traditionally associate with division and peace in NI, such as flags and other symbols, contentious parades, peace walls, or the role of the arts, reconciliation, transitional justice and truth in peacebuilding.\u00a0 While these things remain important, this Positive Peace framework provides an evidence-based and forward-focused way of thinking about peacefulness. It represents a holistic health check.<\/p>\n

What Does the Data Tell Us About These Two Sides of Peace in NI?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Northern Ireland recorded its lowest levels of violence and fear of violence since 2019. Negative Peace improved by 10.7% between 2019 and 2025, with five of the six indicators improving. Homicide fell by 47.9% and recorded paramilitary activity by 44.7%. There are important exceptions. Hate crime increased by 21.5%, with a significant shift towards racially motivated incidents. Violence against women and girls remains a major form of everyday violence.\u00a0 This helps confirm what other measures of peace, such as the Peace Monitoring Report, have already indicated.<\/p>\n

However, building the conditions for Positive Peace has remained uneven. Positive Peace was essentially stagnant during this same timeframe (2019-2025), with four of its eight pillars improving and four deteriorating. Gains in areas such as access to resources, rights and information were offset by deterioration in trust in institutions, government, human capital and relations between communities. Some of the largest improvements were associated with infrastructure and economic indicators, while R&D spending and social housing processing were among the areas that deteriorated most.<\/p>\n

The Index points to several dimensions of the challenges ahead. Northern Ireland has made significant progress on equity and material conditions, but economic dynamism remains comparatively weak, with the deterioration in R&D representing a potential structural constraint on future progress. Formal advances in rights and equality have also outpaced changes in the social fabric where school segregation remains embedded and cross-community socialising has weakened. Moreover, perceptions of fairness and institutional performance matter alongside measured levels of inequality or deprivation.<\/p>\n

The local-level data paints a similar picture. Belfast has the strongest overall Positive Peace position but also the highest concentration of recorded violence, while Derry and Strabane has the weakest Positive Peace position but has recorded some of the largest improvements in violence-related measures. Across Northern Ireland, the areas where peace is least consolidated are marked by persistent deprivation and lower levels of institutional trust.<\/p>\n

The data points to a widening gap.\u00a0 Northern Ireland has become substantially safer without necessarily becoming more resilient.\u00a0 The message is therefore not that Northern Ireland is failing to build peace, but that the progress made in reducing violence has not been matched by progress in the conditions that make this peace durable.<\/p>\n

Why the Institutional and Structural Foundations of Peace Matter<\/strong><\/p>\n

The report suggests that the next phase of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland might concentrate on strengthening the institutional, structural and economic conditions that make peace more resilient and self-sustaining. The Index points to some of the challenges associated with moving towards a society in which the institutions, structures and economic conditions underpinning the current settlement are themselves capable of generating confidence and resilience. That is necessarily a long-term project, and it cannot be assigned to a single peacebuilding policy alone. It will require a whole of government and whole of systems approach.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the findings point to a tension at the heart of Northern Ireland\u2019s political settlement. The power sharing arrangements are perhaps Northern Ireland\u2019s greatest strength, but simultaneously perhaps its greatest weakness.\u00a0 The institutions established by the 1998 Agreement have been remarkably successful in transforming the political management of conflict and in providing the basis for dealing with the past.\u00a0 The power-sharing architecture provides mechanisms for managing competing political identities, but it also institutionalises divisions and leave the government vulnerable to the absence of political consensus.\u00a0 The findings in this report suggest that repeated suspensions of the Executive, for instance, are institutional and structural weaknesses inhibiting the consolidation of Positive Peace.<\/p>\n

The Task Ahead<\/strong><\/p>\n

The headline finding of the NIPI 2026 is worth repeating. Northern Ireland has succeeded in recent years in reducing violence at a pace that should be celebrated, but development of the structural foundations that would make that progress self-sustaining have been uneven.<\/p>\n

Peace, according to this approach, is a system that must be actively maintained. While the Index does not provide a detailed roadmap to tackle the challenges that lie ahead, it does provide a holistic health check to identify the areas of focus that need to be addressed.\u00a0 For policymakers and practitioners, the Index offers a baseline against which future government strategy, funding decisions and local interventions can be reviewed, prioritised and measured, at both regional and district level. The question the data leaves open is whether that evidence base will be used to design a deliberate, cross-departmental strategy for consolidating peace, or whether the gap between Negative and Positive Peace will simply continue to widen with the risks that entails.<\/p>\n

The full report and a practitioner toolkit are available to download here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Northern Ireland Peace Index 2026 was produced by the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast and the Institute for Economics and Peace. The research was funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the responsive mode: secondary data analysis (round two) scheme, project reference UKRI2422.<\/p>\n

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