In this episode of Northern Peacebuilders, we meet David Mitchell, Assistant Professor in Reconciliation and Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin at Belfast, discussing his personal interest in peacebuilding, academic research, challenges in peacebuilding in Northern Ireland and globally, and the relevance of peace education. David emphasises the need for continuous research and education in peace studies to support practitioners in the field.
This episode was produced from an interview by Dr David McCann, televised by community-based Northern Visions (NVTV) and which received funding from the Community Relations Council. We are grateful to David and both organisations.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
David McCANN: Hello and welcome to NVTV. This interview is part of the Northern Peacebuilders project, hosted by Shared Future News. And to go through some of the fascinating insights about peacebuilding, where it is at the minute, where it needs to go in the future, we have David Mitchell. David is the Assistant Professor in Reconciliation and Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin at Belfast.
David, you’re very welcome to NVTV. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m always intrigued about people who research peacebuilding and work in peacebuilding. What was your personal interest? What was it? Because obviously, anyone who’s done a PhD knows that you’ve got a plethora of topics in front of you. You’ve got a plethora of research interests in front of you. What made you get into this?
David MITCHELL: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s something I think about a lot, actually, when you look back over your life. Some of it’s a bit of luck, what you applied for, what came up. But others are maybe you can see kind of a logic to the whole thing.
Maybe the main thing is, I coordinate a master’s in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation. And I actually did a master’s in a similar topic at Ulster University about 20 years ago, the master’s in Peace and Conflict Studies. And I think that’s where I really fell in love with the subject, really got engaged with it. I thought the idea of using your research skills of reading and writing, but to do it on the topic of peace, which is obviously one of the most important topics you could possibly be interested in, was fantastic. And then, subsequently, I did a PhD and then ended up now coordinating a similar master’s, which is great.
There’s probably deeper currents, maybe, in my background. I mean, I had a very religious upbringing, actually. My father was a Presbyterian minister. That was quite a conservative scene, I have to say, back in the day, that I grew up in. But then through that, you actually encounter potentially quite radical ideas in religious traditions. I mean, I was sort of interested in Christian socialism, the peacemaking tradition, the Quakers, the Christian anarchists, the nonviolent types, all those kinds of activist, religious types, which sort of resonated with me, I have to say. That has a link with peace and conflict studies as well, because peace studies, a lot of the founding people were coming from the Quakers, or were inspired by the nonviolent campaigns of Martin Luther King and Gandhi in the middle of the 20th century. So, there was a bit of that going on.
And then another thing that I experienced, which probably had a big influence was moving south from the North. So when I was six, we moved from Lisburn to Sligo because of my dad’s work. And I think that jolt, like even as a six-year-old, I really was aware of going to a very different place from going to, from the Northeast to the West. Sligo was very different. And I think that experience, and then coming back up north later on in life, and feeling another culture shock coming back to a northern kind of world , I was a foreigner for the second time in a sense. I think that’s where it got me interested in Ireland — the sort of political traditions, the cultural traditions, the whole history, the peace process. And then we’re all at how it looked today and where it was all going. So that sense of experiencing difference. And a lot of our students, for example, as well, would have had similar experiences, wherever they’re from. Whenever you’re a kind of cultural outsider, I think they then get interested in studying cultural difference, conflict, peace and conflict studies.
So those are the couple of currents going on that got me into this subject.
David McCANN: It’s just interesting because obviously Shared Future News was hosting an event at the Imagine! Festival based on this, and they’re actually talking to some of the practitioners about it. I was interested in listening to people like Gerard Deane, Dympna McGlade, talking about their own family backgrounds and how that helped them get involved in it.
You mentioned something really interesting there about, obviously, there was a religious emphasis to this, and obviously the Christian socialist part of it. In terms of the practical application, because you’re right to point out that many connotations of our peace process come from religious orders. Is that still with you today? I mean, is that something that you’re still finding today in your approach and how you’re actually applying that in academia?
David MITCHELL: I think so. I mean, I think we often tend to say there are religious ideas and there are secular ideas, but when you study ideas, it’s hard to actually separate them out like that.
For example, a lot of the key ideas in secular political philosophy were outworked by people who would have had a religious belief. So, in a sense, there’s only so many different ideas out there. Yeah, it’s, it’s endlessly fascinating. And I think peace studies is kind of related to, people have written about this, the kind of utopian vision. You need a kind of utopian vision to want to sort of pursue any kind of social change because you have to imagine it before you actually go there. So, a religious culture in that kind of language does give you a bit of that, but I mean, I was a big fan of Star Trek back in the day as well and I wonder if that got me into peace and conflict because there’s a lot of insight in science fiction, which is also a utopian kind of fiction, in terms of a way of exploring the issues of the world through a kind of sideways lens.
David McCANN: So are you drawn to probably, it feels a bit like a therapy session, but do you feel like you’re drawn toward, because you mentioned there about utopian and quite often, obviously we run, Slugger O’Toole, and if you put anything up there regarding kind of peacebuilding, you’ll get the usual comments below going, “Ah, that’s all pie in the sky, utopian, happy, clappy stuff, you should all be up at Corrymeela for the weekend.”
But in terms of, and we’ll get in some more practical applications in a minute, but, but that utopian thing, there is a bit of a draw towards, “This can be a lot better. We can be a lot more reconciled.”
David MITCHELL: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, feminists, trade unionists, environmental activists, they all have some kind of utopian sense that’s come from somewhere.
I mean, one of the things I’m obsessed with is cycling infrastructure. I really believe that and it’s linked to peacebuilding as well, that if you want a peaceful society, then we need to use less cars. We need to have ways for people to get around, for children to be safe, for people with disabilities, for people who are poor and can’t afford cars. It’s all about social inclusion. And if you go somewhere like the Netherlands, or you go to Copenhagen, you actually come back with a kind of utopian sense. And you end up idealising these places because they’re not as good as sometimes we think they are. But nevertheless, you need that kind of image from elsewhere that’s going to give you some kind of motivation. So whether that’s utopian or whatever, it’s just following a model. The kind of sense of where you want to go, I think, is key.
David McCANN: Yeah, you’re right about that. I remember in 2020 putting up this thing about being in Amsterdam and putting up the glories of how kind of the cycling infrastructure was, but the political hard yards to get to there was something that’s quite optimistic. And that leads me actually nicely into my kind of next question.
Is peacebuilding, in your opinion, do you think that it’s a recognised profession? And what is the role of kind of academic research? So what you’re doing and kind of qualifications in establishing benchmarks for people who are working in this area?
David MITCHELL: Yeah, I think that’s a good question. It’s maybe a better question for the practitioners, actually, to ask peacebuilding organisations what they think about academic qualifications. Obviously, I think what I do is very important and very useful. But in any field, I suppose there’s a kind of tension between the scholars and the practitioners, with both thinking that they do the most important work.
I mean, I teach on a master’s course, so it’s very much an academic qualification. It’s not tied to practice in the way that learning to be a dentist or a bricklayer or anything like that is. You don’t just become a peacebuilder when you graduate. You get more generic skills about how to think about conflict, how conflict manifests itself around the world, some skills around mediation, and so on, but it’s not the direct link. But I think it would be attractive to a lot of employers to see that somebody’s got a master’s in peace and conflict studies because it shows that they’re aware of more than just one place, they’ve considered all kinds of differences, and so on.
So, yeah, it’s important. But I think peace and conflict studies is for everybody, not just people who want to practice it.
David McCANN: I suppose one of the things that academia can do for anyone coming in is they can take you to those different places. Places that you may not be aware of: places like Cyprus, like Sri Lanka, and places like that, and see what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.
David MITCHELL: Yeah. And we try to be as practical as reasonably possible here. So we’re in Belfast for a reason. I mean, our course was created by the Irish School of Ecumenics about 20 years ago deliberately as a kind of contribution to the peace process here and to try and disseminate some of that international knowledge for local peacebuilders. And this was sort of at the high point of the peace process here. So there definitely was a practical goal to the master’s.
We try to engage with civil society as much as we can. We go out and we meet peace groups, we bring people into the classroom to talk, we have student placements, I’ll sometimes do research alongside a civil society organisation. So there are ways for academics to be engaged. And I think in general, nearly all academics are engaged with the real world. I think it’s unfair to think of academics as being in the ivory tower or whatever. It’s expected nowadays that we actually will make a public impact through media work, or through working with civil society groups.
David McCANN: In terms of the cohorts you get through… obviously, look, I appreciate every academic year is different from the last, but are there any specific types of people you typically get in front of you? Are they people from certain backgrounds or certain interests or things like that?
David MITCHELL: I think so. Like I said earlier, I think you get a certain amount of people who have had an experience of cultural dislocation of some kind, and that gets them interested in conflict resolution. Most of our students are international, which is something that I’m a little bit disappointed with. I’d love to get more local students and have a mix of local and international students, but maybe it’s just the international student market that most of our students will come from other countries. A lot from the US, but we have students from every continent really.
There’ll be people who are interested in peace: they’ll have the utopian visions of one kind or the other. They might be left-leaning, probably that type, although not everybody. We’ll get a range of people. People from more conservative backgrounds, people of different experiences, people who are more skeptical. We’ve had a few people who are involved in security forces of one kind or the other over the years. And most people will go on probably to work with NGOs of one kind, maybe local community organisations or international NGOs. Some people will go on to diplomacy, or try and work with the UN. And quite a few every year will go on and do PhDs because they see the course as a good stepping stone into learning how to do peace research.
So that would be the type of students, you know, we get.
David McCANN: So what academic theories or kind of comparative case studies have you found relevant for Northern Ireland? Because quite often, people in Northern Ireland think that we’re the only place that’s really had any kind of difficulties or any issues around peacebuilding. But, looking at the big world out there, we are not alone.
David MITCHELL: No, that’s the thing that always amazes me, surprises me, doesn’t really surprise me. But when I look around the world, I mean, there’s literally nothing about the conflict here that is unique. I mean, not a single thing, really.
Now how it manifested itself is unique, of course, because we have a certain geography, history, certain different groups involved, but most conflicts are about pretty similar things. They’re about a contested state, probably as a result of decolonisation of one type or another. So the empire has collapsed, and then there’s contestation around the state that comes after it. So all our issues around borders, dealing with the past, symbolic conflict, are all very generic. You can go to the most far-flung country that you’ve barely heard of on the map, and you suddenly find that they’ve got pretty similar issues.
I mean, one of the things I’ve done recently, in the last five or six years, I’ve worked with a Korean colleague, Dong Jin Kim, on trying to explore this comparison between Ireland and Korea. And people tease us — you know, ” It’s a ridiculous comparison,” but it’s remarkable. When you dig down, actually the similarities appear and the differences as well. So comparison isn’t just about pretending that things are the same. It’s also about showing what’s different. But at a human level, that’s where I find that the connection is made. We brought a lot of Koreans to Ireland, and they see the differences, but they also get the concept of difference. They grew up with an “other” out there, a kind of dehumanised “other”. They’re fascinated by our border transformation, actually. Obviously, Korea has the hardest border, maybe in the world. We’ve transformed our border. Now, it’s a different situation, I know, but it’s still fascinating for them to see that visually, like right in front of them.
So, there are so many parallels with so many places. I think it’s quite mind-bending, actually, when you realise you’re not unique, and you’ve got this shared experience with all these people around the world. I think it’s extraordinary, and I think it would really benefit people in Northern Ireland to have a better sense of that. How we’re not different, and also how great Northern Ireland is in many ways compared to so many places. Our peace process is a success by any reasonable measure. And Northern Ireland is still for all our problems, economic problems, a relatively developed place where you can have a safe and pleasant life for most people. And that’s just not the case for much of the world. So it’s really quite amazing to realise that.
David McCANN: Yeah. I remember being an early career researcher going out to Korea to extol the virtues of our border. My PhD was in North-South relations, so I was telling them about our experience, but sadly we had the flag protest going on at the same time, so that was across the screens on CNN. It had just erupted.
David MITCHELL: I would understand that — the contest over symbols, really minute things, what places are named as well, so yeah.
David McCANN: They got it. They got it, but it was, it was an interesting thing about, head in my hands, thinking about the trouble going on here, the flag protest that literally just started. And actually, yeah, you’re right. Going somewhere else and realising symbolism is such a big deal.
In terms of how academics, you’ve answered a wee bit of this, but, because you were talking there about, there is the thing about the ivory tower, right, and that can be sometimes fairly or unfairly done. But how do academics engage, in your experience, how do they engage with kind of peacebuilding? Is there any really great examples? You referenced one there about Korea, but did you have any others?
David MITCHELL: Where do you start? I suppose there’s a trend now that research councils and governments will want you to be engaged with civil society. And I suppose the idea is that we don’t just research communities and stuff, we do research with them that should have some kind of social benefit.
The way I think about it is, one of the things an academic can do is tell a positive story. So they can go out there and find good work that’s happening, best practice, and write it up, explain this to the world. I mean, I’ve done this a few times myself A few modest things.
So I mean, I worked with a student to write an article about the Turas project, which you’ll know, people will know with Linda Ervine. So, I came across that project, teaching Irish to mostly Protestants on the Lower Newtownards Road. It blew my mind for all kinds of reasons. And I thought this was fascinating and really got into it. And, well, I’m not much of an activist. What can I contribute? So, well, I like writing academic articles. So that’s what we did. Just to give them a little bit of a platform, tell the story. And, my sense was that it was relevant, not just for us, but actually might be interesting internationally because of all these generic cultural conflicts that happen all around the world.
So there’s little things like that. We’ve tried to support a youth project in North Belfast, the RCITY project, which brings young people together from the Ardoyne and Shankill. And we take our students up there, we’ve had students on placement, we’ve had the facilitators come and talk to us and everything. And they’ve supported some of our students’ research as well, and some of mine, actually. Jin, my Korean colleague, he set up a connection between young people in North Belfast and young people in Korea, actually, and they have these regular Zoom meetings. They talk about their lives, and, you know they can barely understand each other, but it’s got better and better, and it’s fascinating, and they’ve had staff exchanges between Belfast and Korea as well. They’re hoping to build on that. So yeah, you just have to be on the lookout for ways.
I think the media is another one that academics do quite well. I mean, as you’ll know, we have a lot of good academics here who do a public service by putting themselves out there, going on the media, giving us evidence and clear commentary, which sometimes is a bit different to the kind of politicised discourses that we have. And not just in politics, but across a range of disciplines, academics are doing that public service, I think. And it’s not always easy because academics naturally like to stay in their office, hide away from people. They’re not always kind of front-of-house people. But I think that’s another way that academia can engage, with the world outside.
David McCANN: So you’ve talked there. I mean, what are the main, in your opinion, challenges for peacebuilding in Northern Ireland and elsewhere? So you’ve talked about some of the successes, but there are still, I mean, obviously last year with the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Great to do the George Mitchell piece and laud the successes of which there are many, but we do also have some challenges as well. So, where do you think we are with that piece?
David MITCHELL: I mean, I sometimes wonder: are we still in the peace process, or are we now somewhere else? You know, it feels, since Brexit, this Irish unity debate has got underway. It’s not that we don’t need to do peacebuilding anymore, but it almost feels like we’re in a new world. And we’re more conscious now of other divisions in society, whether it’s racial, sexual orientation, gender, and so on and so on. As the Orange-Green divide has receded somewhat, we’re more aware of these other issues of social inclusion, I guess. So I think most of us probably see peace, and most peace practitioners will see peace, in a bigger framework now, maybe to even 20 or 30 years ago, when it was just about the Orange-Green issue.
Now, we’re more interested in all aspects of inclusion and sort of understanding, and social justice as well. Going forward, when you look around the world, I guess the big challenge is this rise of populism, the kind of illiberal democracy that we’re seeing all over the world, unfortunately. I think that’s probably peace studies’ big challenge generally. I mean, I think the democratic peak globally was something around 2006, and since then, democracy has actually been in retreat around the world, which is, you know, quite depressing. And trying to deal with that, I think, is really the big problem. And how do you solve that? I mean, I think we need peace education. That’s what I think we need.
David McCANN: Well, where would peace education be? And because that was what I was just thinking about. You’re obviously outlining the problem there. But where would that be? Would that be in primary school, secondary school?
David MITCHELL: Well, peace education can happen anywhere. And often it happens in communities rather than schools because schools have a formal agenda, which are often quite tied to employability and so on. But, when you think about the big forces that have shaped the world, whether it’s racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, you can actually go through school and university and not really understand any of them properly, you know? They have a tendency to sort of hide in plain sight. And this is something that I learned. This is why I believe in peace education, because I think I was changed by my own education. So that’s why I believe it’s effective. And I think what you learn about where all those things came from and the kind of subtle impacts they have, often not subtle impacts as well, then you can’t unsee that kind of thing. You then can understand the problems.
I mean especially nationalism. I mean, the academic literature on nationalism and the history of where nationalism came from as a general phenomenon, not Irish nationalism, but generally, is absolutely fascinating. And again, it’s quite mind-blowing to think that we’re born into nations, and we think this is a kind of natural state of things, and we have our own state because we’re all a happy nation together. But you learn, as is well established in scholarship on nationalism, that nations are these invented things, that essentially big power units called states made up nationalism as a way to get people to obey the state and go out and fight for it. That’s how states evolved.
Now, states are good at providing public services and so on. They’re quite useful and efficient and that’s why they’re still around. But when you really dig into the kind of socially constructed nature of our world, you realise it’s got a crazy origin, and there’s so much awful stuff in history, but also that, you know, if we made the world this way, then we can make the world in a different way. I think that’s what education is really about: that we don’t just take the world for granted, that we are empowered. That’s what peace education is all about, to empower people to try and change it if they can.
David McCANN: Is there a danger? Because we’re now in 26 years from the Good Friday Agreement. There is a sense that the big piece, if we pardon the pun, is solved. That is solved. We often hear that phrase, “We’re not going back.” I hear that. It’s one thing that unites the leaders of the main communal blocs. “We’re not going to go back to that. Stormont may fall, it may rise, no matter what, but we’re not going to go back to 1969 to 1998.”
You’ve raised the danger of complacency there. I mean, what do your sense of? Because if it is, if we if we’ve kind of got the big kind of peace process issue solved, then that falls into the background. The work that you’re kind of doing falls down the rungs of prominence for funding, for attention, for these different things. And I’m not saying this in a rent-seeking way, but I mean this in a in a way because quite often we forget.
I would often have teased my grandmother for moving back here in 1968 from London, and she would have always said to me, “You know, David, none of us knew that the Troubles were going to happen. You’re looking back 25 years after the fact, none of us knew that that was going to happen. We kind of slept-walked into it.” So what would be your sense of that?
David MITCHELL: I’m quite optimistic about Northern Ireland, partly because of what I’ve been saying about, when you compare it to other places, our problems are relatively minor. And I think the achievements here are amazing. And another reason I’m optimistic is because I’ve met so many people who have changed themselves and do amazing work. The sense of human transformation, I think, is quite clear here. But the idea that peace and reconciliation are not relevant is nonsense.
I mean, it is true that we’ve made big achievements here, but we’re in a global world. That’s a tautology, but we’re in a big interconnected world. I mean, just turn on the news. Ukraine, Europe has re-militarised before our very eyes. Production of weapons in East Belfast, near me, is soaring because of the Ukraine war, I’ve just read today. And then what you’ve got going on in Gaza where, Israel and its Western allies, which purport to be the most advanced countries in the world, are managing to oversee the slaughter of people. And it’s happening on the news and we can’t really do anything about it. So that suggests again, to me, that we do need to educate ourselves and pay a lot closer attention to what’s going on.
And certainly in an Irish context, let’s not be complacent either because we know people are talking now about the next thing, possible Irish unity. And I think there’s an interesting debate about the reconciliation versus Irish unity, which I saw on TV the other night.
David McCANN: What did you make as someone who’s involved in kind of this debate? And obviously, I’m not asking you to state any views on the constitutional preference, but for you, in terms of that debate, because often it was interesting, and I actually have read columns from it, the divergence between how unionists reacted to that, how Irish nationalists reacted to that, people in the Alliance Party reacted to it. What did you make of it?
David MITCHELL: Yeah, it’s quite a complex and subtle debate, I think. You sort of have to really think about it. I mean, I suppose I can see both sides. I mean, my instincts would be: yeah, let’s reconcile first and then have Irish unity, if that’s what people want. But again, the counter-argument is also true, that we can’t necessarily say when we’ve reached reconciliation.
And arguably, that’s then a disincentive for unionists to reconcile if they don’t want constitutional change. But this is all part of the debate, and we have to have these really interesting conversations. And maybe that’s one of the challenges for us here in the North going forward, which is to try and have both of these conversations in a sensible way at the same time. I think the Irish unity debate is fascinating, even just because it’s an opportunity to think about politics more, to think about the type of country we want. I think it’s also useful in the sense that it may show up some of the deep differences and problems that we still have between the North and the South.
So I think, because of my experience of crossing the border a lot throughout my life, I’m very aware of these differences. And again, the North being different to the South doesn’t mean we can’t have Irish unity because there are lots of states in the world that have profound regional differences and they function okay. But nevertheless, I mean, it’s amazing to think about the degree of difference between the North and the South. And it may be that we have the debate and we conclude we don’t want Irish unity. I mean, I think it’s the preordained nature of the debate that annoys unionists. That’s the way Sinn Féin talk about it. But it could well be, especially Southerners may have the debate and they might not like the look of what it might mean. But I think it can coexist alongside the reconciliation work. They don’t have to be at loggerheads.
David McCANN: Yeah, and we saw, obviously, Cyprus is a famous example where the North voted one way for unification. The South went another way and just emphasised the differences about what unity meant to the two. And when that rubber hit the road, it was that two states went a different way.
What further research is being done that can assist people who are practitioners in this field?
David MITCHELL: Academics can only do so much, and I’m not sure that practitioners are sitting around waiting for some kind of academic to come along with the sort of the Holy Grail of the answer to conflict.
I think we just need to keep studying and keep educating really, and that will support the practitioners. I mean, something I’d love to do is to get peace studies out there more. The course I teach is a master’s at a good university. It’s behind, the firewall of fees and so on. And it’s not really accessible to ordinary people, especially those in communities who might benefit from it. It’s not accessible to practitioners, particularly, either, who can’t pay the fees or don’t have the time and so on. So, I’d love to find ways of bringing peace studies out there more and more and more and get ways to engage the public just with the concept of peace and have those debates. Because, like we’re saying about Ukraine and Gaza and so many other places, it’s just such a relevant, important topic.
I mean, if we can’t live together, then humanity doesn’t have a future. So I think that’s what I would say, again. That education element.
David McCANN: Brilliant. Okay, David, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you. It was so multifaceted and in a time when nuance is in short supply, it’s been really refreshing to have such a nuanced conversation.
So thank you very much for your time today.
You have been listening and watching David Mitchell talking to me, David McCann. This has been part of the Northern Peacebuilders project. If you’ve been interested in any aspect of this conversation, you can visit Shared Future News for other episodes and podcasts.
This episode is part of our series on Northern Peacebuilders — interviews with individuals whose work and efforts contribute to better community relations in Northern Ireland.
The theme song, The Trouble’s Never Over, is used by license from Scott Anderson.
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