Civil Servants and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Civil Servants and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland by Dr Giada Lagana provides the first systematic analysis of the role played by the British, Irish, and Northern Irish civil services in designing, stabilising, and sustaining the Northern Ireland peace process. While political leaders, parties, civil society actors, and international mediators have received extensive attention, the contribution of public bureaucracies to the construction and maintenance of peace has remained largely invisible. Drawing on extensive archival research and more than thirty elite interviews with civil servants, politicians, and other participants in the peace process, the book reconstructs this hidden administrative architecture. The book argues that peace in Northern Ireland was not only negotiated politically but also built administratively. Civil servants organised negotiating arenas, drafted and refined political texts, cultivated cross-border networks, preserved institutional memory, and maintained channels of communication through periods of crisis and institutional breakdown. In doing so, they helped shape the conditions under which political compromise became possible and could subsequently be sustained. Bridging political science, public administration, and history, Civil Servants and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland develops an account of peacebuilding as a form of interactive governance, examining how officials designed and steered the rules, procedures, relationships, and arenas through which political interaction took place. Particular attention is paid to bureaucratic culture, institutional memory, cross-border cooperation, secrecy and backstage diplomacy, and the use of procedural innovation and multivocality to maintain dialogue when political consensus was absent. By placing administrative practice at the centre of the analysis, the book brings into view a previously under-systematised dimension of the Northern Ireland peace process and offers wider insights into how bureaucratic infrastructures can underpin political stability in divided societies, particularly when formal political institutions falter. During the session, Dr Giada Lagana will introduce the book and its central arguments. This will be followed by comments from Dr Antoine Yenk (University of Oxford) and a Q&A session, with time afterwards for a more informal discussion among participants.