Belfast's Cultural Policy - 'Culture Threatens No One'

This paper explores the question of how cultural policy and its initiatives are deployed and appraised in a post-conflict divided city (Belfast). Belfast is the administrative capital of Northern Ireland (NI), part of a select group of countries, who share an island and geographic mass with one country (Republic of Ireland), while being part of another (the United Kingdom), see also Sint Maarten and St. Martin. Like many such countries, its bi-jurisdiction is a result of conflict and coloniality. A lengthy scholarship exists on the religious and ethno-national/political conflict that brought Northern Ireland into being, erupted in civil war and paramilitary violence leading to ceasefires and an international peace treaty in 1998. Subsequent consociationalist governments have repeatedly collapsed due to continued bi partisan tensions (most recently ongoing since 2022), leaving local governments as the principal active forum in which such tensions might be played out or resolved in ‘hyper-localities’ (Doak 2020). While there is little research on cultural policy in NI and Belfast, its complex polarisation of cultural identities and histories alongside growing population diversity and new urgencies such as climate crisis offer new understandings (Ramsey &amp; Bradley 2018, Crangle 2018, Durrer &amp; McCall Magan, 2017, Hocking 2015,). <br/><br/>Our methodology combines ongoing collaborative discussions with Belfast City Council Culture Team, commencing in 2021, and analysis of council documents (2015 - present). We observe the rapid evolution of distinct arts, heritage and cultural policies (from 1994) and focus on the ambitious 10-year cultural strategy (A City Imagining 2020 – 2030) that emerged in the aftermath of its excluded bid with Derry/Londonderry for European Capital of Culture (2017). This strategy features new capital acquisitions (an indoor public park 2RA in 2020), achievement of UNESCO Music City designation (2021), a yearlong cultural celebration (2024) and a multi-million pound oral history project (Belfast Stories opening 2028/29).<br/><br/>We argue that, not unlike its companion ECOC city Derry, first UK City of Culture (2013) (Doak, 2020), Belfast City Council has used external schemes to lever resources and support. Yet it has adapted such global models of creative cities to accommodate the cultural schisms that continue to exist in a divided city. Culture is often posed as a solution to post-conflict transformation yet competing cultures exist as the root tension (as our title, taken from a 2016 mural, suggests) while the bipartisan nature of political decision-making often limits the scope to address other identities/needs (e.g., growing multiculturalism). <br/><br/>We situate culture within urban post-conflict cultural policy then as both problem and solution and consider how local governments respond to the challenge. Through this, we bring new considerations of the impact of conflict and cultural conflict to the study of creative cities and raise interesting new questions about the necessary ambiguities deployed by cultural political actors in such settings.