[Doctoral Seminar] The Actors in Collective Mobilizations: Continuities and Discontinuities

"Responding to Conflict Through Culture—The West Belfast Festival"
Karine Bigand, Aix-Marseille University
Discussant: Cécile Bazin, UPHF

By 1988, the conflict in Northern Ireland had been raging for nearly twenty years, with no tangible prospect of resolution in sight. In March, violence spiked significantly following a series of deadly incidents involving British security forces and local republican and loyalist paramilitary groups. The nationalist community in West Belfast, where several of these incidents occurred, was both terrified by the resurgence of violence and widely condemned in the media. It was against this backdrop that the idea emerged to organize a summer festival, with the aim of restoring optimism to the community by celebrating its energy and creativity, as well as presenting a more positive image to outside observers. Born out of the desire of a stigmatized segment of civil society to assert itself and respond to the conflict through culture and the arts, the West Belfast festival—now known as Féile an Phobail (the People’s Festival)—is today, nearly forty years later, one of the largest community festivals in Europe.