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In 2010, 12 years after the signing and popular ratification of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (BGFA), the decommissioning of Irish Republican Army (IRA) weapons, and a significant decline in political violence, paramilitary public symbolic displays (PSDs) remained as prominent features of the landscape of Northern Ireland. Their contents and locations constituted an important, contradictory, and contested part of the peace process. We argue that paramilitary murals and other symbolic sites, such as memorial gardens and plaques, continue to tap into ethno-national collective identities forged in conflict but also exhibit a range of reframing strategies that we refer to as historicization, articulation, and suppression. We further argue that contextual factors affect the likelihood of these displays appearing within a given geographic area. To assess these hypotheses, we conduct content and geospatial analyses of all identified PSDs in West Belfast in 2010. The results lend support to a context-sensitive approach to predicting the contents and locations of paramilitary PSDs in Northern Ireland.

Hostile countermobilization is a crucial, yet relatively understudied, factor in radicalizing movement tactics and generating political violence. This chapter focuses on the movement–countermovement interactions between the Civil Rights Movement and the Loyalist movement in Northern Ireland to clarify the emergence and intensification of political violence in the 1968–1969 years. The interactions between the civil rights mobilization and the loyalist countermobilization created the conditions to fuel both protest-based and sectarian violence, setting the terrain for the eruption of the Troubles. Relying on quantitative data on the actors participating to contentious collective events, as well as original archival research, this chapter shows how the loyalist countermobilization activated mechanisms of object shift and tactical codependency that facilitated the emergence of radicalization in Northern Ireland.

What are the consequences of urban life in an ethno-nationally contested city? How do everyday practices confront municipal strategies that attempt to control such urban situations? Focusing on urban life in which daily negotiation of ethno-national differences occurs, this chapter considers the nuances of urban politics and the use and meaning of the urban space, i.e., the micro-politics and the social dynamic of place-making, and their role in the struggle for urban citizenship in an ethno-nationally mixed city. Discourse analysis and ethnographic encounters define the annual Holiday of Holidays festival in the Israeli–Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas as integral to Haifa's strategy for promoting itself as a site of coexistence. The neighborhood serves the entire city in that its “Arab” urban space has become the emblem of that coexistence. This manipulation by the municipality is, however, not reinforced by urban regeneration and heritage management of the local Palestinian community. Nonetheless coexistence discourse is also employed by the residents themselves, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the role of urban space in promoting the city, as well as of concepts of local identity and citizenship.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the six main articles which represent the special issue on “Growing up in divided societies” and to locate the articles within a framework of children's experiences of divided societies.

The article reviews the main methodologies employed by authors of the six articles and evaluates how these methodologies contribute to debates on researching children and young people's everyday lives.

The paper presents the core findings of the six articles and discusses these in relation to core themes, methodologies and policy implications.

The authors argue that there is a dearth of research on children and young people's everyday lives in politically contested societies and the special issue responds to this vacuum.

Representations of female perpetrators of political violence contribute to society's thinking about women, gender, violence and agency. Analysis of this discourse is vital to understand its influence on society's knowledge of women and violence. The study investigates how gendered narratives are used to frame female ex-combatants in Nationalist and Unionist newspapers in the post-conflict society of Northern Ireland. The media is a central agent in the construction of knowledge; and this is significant for women who have perpetrated crimes or (political) violence. The existing research found that violent women are narrated and interpreted through gendered discursive frameworks to dismiss or make sense of their violence. However, in the Northern Irish case, although the women are constructed within gendered frames, this does not deny their agency in past political violence.

Israel ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and has subsequently worked towards putting disability-empowering policies and facilities in place. This study explores the experiences of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel with disabilities in everyday life including education, employment and accessing disability facilities and services.

This study explores the challenges and experiences of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a disparate group of Arab men and women with various forms of disabilities.

This research indicates that Arabs with disabilities are either unable to access them or do so with great difficulty relative to their Jewish counterparts. The findings suggest that this is due to one of two reasons: first is institutional discrimination by Jewish and Arab staff, and second is structural discrimination as facilities and services are specifically designed for the Jewish majority and their areas of residence as opposed to Arab residential areas.

Guided by intersectional theory, this article explores how the multiple identities of Arabs with disabilities living in Israel are co-constituted and ordered by different social and political structures which inform their daily lived experiences. This research illustrates that in Jewish politics and institutions, Arabs with disabilities in Israel are “otherised” by being flatly identified as Palestinians; yet, within their Arab communities, they are “otherised” by being reduced solely to their disability. This article examines how this variation in ordering and reduction can lead to specific experiences and forms of discrimination that requires multi-dimensional approaches and ways forward.

In this chapter, we analyse the role of women in armed Basque nationalist and separatist terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) from a gender perspective. ETA women were essential agents in the armed conflict, but their image in the mass media and society has been very different from that of their male colleagues (Rodríguez Lara, 2017). Also, their role in the terrorist gang has described a sexually based functional specialisation. In addition, this chapter seeks to contribute to the area of feminist studies on women and political violence. Women's role in one of the most important armed nationalist groups in Europe, ETA, stands as a suitable case study to understand how the mass media (press, journalism), audiovisual content, and social representations of ETA have portrayed these women. The final conclusion of this chapter is that women were not portrayed in the same way as their male colleagues. Women of ETA were doubly penalised because they were women and because they were terrorists.

Security and safety have remained important concerns for mankind since ancient times. In the context of railways, however, the threat perceptions to safety and security have increased significantly lately. In view of this, the Indian Railways requires an effective and efficient security management system. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated approach to help develop the Indian railway security system (IRSS) by successively reducing the complexity of the system through a series of studies.

The relevant elements of the complex system of Indian Railways have been identified. The framework in which the elements exist and interact with each other has been clearly established using the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique. The output of ISM is further reduced in complexity by having different policy option profiles. A comparison of different option profiles has been done by a multi-criteria decision-making technique, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), by choosing suitable criteria for comparison.

The following elements need to be pursued as the key objectives for making IRSS: protection of passengers, protection of property, modernisation, manpower enhancement, multi-skilling of staff, latest technology and enhanced legal powers.

The present research can be extended in many important ways. Interpretive structural models for different contextual relationships can be developed and used for formulating and implementing customised security policy. Policy elements and the ISM structure obtained in this research can be utilised for the system dynamic modelling of IRSS. A pilot study can be done to implement the recommendations made in this study.

The ISM model developed can be implemented as a policy tool in enhancing the railway’s security. Some of the policy elements proposed appear to be consistent with the strategic direction being undertaken in the railway security in the country.

Security is an important concern for mankind and social civilisations. The results have significant welfare implications in India and the rest of the world.

The present study is one of the first approaches in a series of studies in railway security in India. The results of this study can be extended to other security scenarios with similar needs.

Historically, counter-terrorism's attitude towards women has been complicated, partly because both counter-terrorism and terrorism were for many years considered almost exclusively a male business. This approach has also been reflected in the media's sensationalised representation of women involved in political violence. This chapter explores how women's participation in non-state political violence is still largely explained through traditional conservative notions of sexual difference that characterise women as irrational and highly influenceable, eliminating the possibility of any informed discussion. Focusing on the British case, the chapter shows how the actions of female militants are still bound to gendered narratives and limited to specific frames that generally portray violent women as highly sexualised and pathologised. Depictions of female terrorists and ‘radicalised’ women are based on stereotypes that reinforce the image of women as weak, easily influenced, naïve, driven by romantic emotions, deceitful and in constant need of protection and supervision. From an intersectional perspective, the chapter also explores the orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women who are seen as victims and as individuals lacking empowerment and agency. The discussion highlights ultimately that explanations of women's violence must go beyond myths that explain women's involvement in political violence via a wide range of personal and emotional factors, to examine political motivations and consideration of the complexity of their decisions, and the wider context.