Civil Servants and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

Abstract Although the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ended large-scale violence in Northern Ireland, the durability of peace remains fragile. Persistent sectarian division, institutional instability, and Brexit have repeatedly tested the settlement. While political leaders, parties, civil society actors, and international mediators have been extensively studied, one crucial dimension of the peace process has remained largely invisible: the role of the public bureaucracy. This book offers the first systematic analysis of how the British, Irish, and Northern Irish civil services helped to design, stabilise, and manage peace in Northern Ireland. The central argument is that peace was not only negotiated politically but also built administratively, through the everyday practices of officials who organised negotiating arenas, drafted texts, cultivated cross-border networks, and managed continuity through periods of crisis and institutional breakdown. Adopting an interdisciplinary framework that bridges political science, public administration, and history, and drawing on extensive archival research and more than thirty elite interviews, the analysis reconstructs the hidden administrative architecture of peacebuilding. Civil servants are foregrounded as policy entrepreneurs acting under ministerial authority and shaping the procedural and organisational conditions under which compromise became possible. Conceptually, the book frames peacebuilding as a pathway towards the institutionalisation of interactive governance, enabled by practices of metagovernance. By placing administrative practice at the centre of the analysis, the book extends debates on governance and peacebuilding and demonstrates how bureaucratic infrastructures can underpin political stability even when formal institutions falter. These insights speak to other societies grappling with conflict, division, and fragile settlements.