Youth repertoires and cosmopolitan horizons in deeply divided contexts

This article explores how young people reimagine social relations and negotiate difference within a deeply divided context in a period of increasing national contention. It explores if and how they combine an ethno-national situatedness and wider shared horizons. It uses a ‘situated cosmopolitan’ frame as a heuristic and shows how the case illustrates the difficulty of this stance. The article reports on research that engaged with 52 young participants in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland between 2014 and 2022. Using interviews, focus groups and a deliberative café method, we analyse how they qualify national particularism to make divisions less important. We argue that ‘friendly conversation’ is a key mechanism by which shared horizons are constructed by young people, who reframe their political choices and constitutional preferences in universalist ways, open to understanding and reflection. Our study has important political implications. We show the demonstrable appetite among young people to explore diversity and division, the need to initiate deliberative arenas for informal friendly conversations among the young, and to reframe divisive national and constitutional debate in terms of the shared values that we have analysed.