Video: Religion and Just Peace: The Fog of Religious Conflict: Can the Fog Lift?

March 20, 2025

On becoming dean of HDS in 2012, David N. Hempton, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, gave a Convocation address entitled ‘The Fog of Religious Conflict: Eleven Reflections from a Conflict Zone.’ The talk was a play on Errol Morris’s film about the Vietnam War and was based on his experiences in Belfast, Ireland, during the ‘Troubles’. The aim was to build understanding for those caught up in conflicts with roots much deeper than their own lifespans.

In this session of "Religion and Just Peace | A Series of Public Online Conversations," Hempton spoke from his own background in Belfast, which showed him that religious ideas, in George Eliot’s words, ‘have the fate of melodies, which, once afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.’ He reflected on the impact of the ‘Troubles’ on his own scholarship, which can be framed around the dialectical tension of religious ideas operating as both attractive and detestable melodies. Hempton then discussed how the fog of religious conflict was slowly lifted after the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 under five alliterative headings: identity aspirations; institutional access; investment opportunities; injustices and inequities; and international support.

This is the final event of a series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to the work of just peacebuilding.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Harvard Divinity School. The fog of religious conflict. Can the fog lift? February 24, 2025.

DAVID HOLLAND: Greetings and good evening. I extend a heartfelt welcome back to our series of online conversations about religion and just peace. Many of you have also been with us in previous weeks for our discussions with Professor Shaul Magid and Annette Yoshiko Reed, and some of you have joined us newly for this evening. We're glad to have all of you participating in tonight's conversation.

I'm David Holland, I'm a faculty member here at Harvard Divinity School. I also currently serve as academic dean and interim director of religion and public life. I'd like to begin by thanking again, my colleague Diane Moore, who is the originator and organizer of this excellent series of conversations, and I'm grateful for the chance to be the host of this evening's gathering. We're very grateful to hear tonight from my colleague, Professor David Hempton, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies.

Before saying more about this evening's event, we pause in recognition of land and people affirming that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.

As previously mentioned, this year's series of online conversations is the third installment in a recurrent set of discussions designed to shine a light on the work that HDS faculty do that has special relevance for the public challenges of our present moment. As Professor Hempton will demonstrate here this evening, when we need to engage each episode of human conflict in its particular setting and context, are careful and critical examinations of these particular episodes can also yield important insight and perspective for engaging the conflicts of other times and other places, including our own.

Previous iterations of the program. Address religion and the legacies of slavery, and religion and climate crisis. This year's series focuses on religion and just peace, reflecting the Harvard Divinity School vision of studying religion in service of just peace across religious and cultural divides to quote the HDS vision statement.

In that spirit, we are most fortunate this evening to be in conversation with Professor Hempton. When Professor David Hempton arrived at Harvard Divinity School in 2007, he was already among the world's most influential historians of religion in 18th and 19th century Britain and the anglophonic world, and he has only burnished his accolades since then.

His books have set much of the scholarly agenda in transatlantic religion and global studies and Christianity. A mere listing of the titles of his works suggests the scope and ambition of his historical vision. These include, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, from the Glorious Revolution to the decline of empire, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century, and most recently an edited volume, Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic world.

One of the striking features of David's scholarship is that even as he is capable of giving us a broad and sweeping view of large and important historical changes, he also has the human sensitivity, the deftness of touch and biographical care to delve into the very personal experiences of his subjects, as he does so memorably in his book Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt. I believe in David can correct me if I'm wrong, that every book David has ever published has received an award from some August body and well deserved.

From 2011 to 2023, David served as the Dean of Harvard Divinity School, where he both honored the most honorable parts of the school's legacy and led us boldly into needed new chapters and changes. On a personal note, I'm grateful that David, who is the Dean when I was hired at HDS. He's been a wonderful colleague every day since. David is also a beloved teacher who has helped his students sharpen their historical thinking, tighten their historical methods, and produce important new interventions into our understanding of early modern religious life.

Among the notable qualities of his pedagogy is his ability to bring personal experience to bear in his teaching. Drawing from his growing up in an intellectual formation in Northern Ireland. That background will enrich his discussion of conflict and just peace this evening, as he will speak on the fog of religious conflict. Discussing the impact on his scholarship of Ireland's troubles, which can be framed around the dialogical tension of religious ideas operating as both attractive and testable melodies. Will now be pleased to hear from Professor Hempton.

DAVID HEMPTON: Thanks, David, very much. That nice introduction. Thanks to Dan Moore and all the wonderful staff at the Religion and Public life for their organization of this event and for their support through it all. And to all of you for making the time to spend some time on this important topic this evening. I hope it turns out to be worth your while.

So in thinking about this concept of just peace, I'll be speaking about the 30-year conflict in Ireland, known colloquially as the Troubles, which broke out in 1968 and ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. I lived in Northern Ireland for most of that time, and was also Professor of history and director of the school of history in the Queen's University of Belfast. So I come to this issue both as a historian and as someone who lived day-to-day in a troubled and violent landscape.

After the peace agreement was signed in 1998, I moved to the United States and as you know, became Dean of the Harvard Divinity School in 2012. And then my first convocation address, I spoke about the fog of religious conflict, which, of course, was a play on Errol Morris's famous film about Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War.

Like Morris, I listed 11 components of the fog of religious conflict from my own firsthand experiences as a young adult in Belfast. And I'll say something more about those later, along with really getting to the crux of it, about how the Good Friday Agreement came to be in place, what were its principles, why did it succeed when other attempts failed, and what are the current threats to peace in Northern Ireland right now.

So I'll begin with two preliminary remarks. The first is taken from my favorite novelist, George Eliade, who wrote that, "Religious ideas have the fate of melodies which, once afloat in the world are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is testable." And the second is that, "Although the Irish troubles contain many similar elements and causes to other conflicts in the world, the historian in me knows that no two conflicts are exactly the same."

So that attempts to derive general principles from unique historical contexts just need to be approached with a little bit of care. That's not to say that we can't learn from more successful attempts to mediate conflict, but as the career of George Mitchell shows, some conflicts are easier to negotiate than others. And he had a successful time, as we'll see later, negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. But really did not have such a fruitful engagement when he was nominated as a American envoy for peacemaking in the Middle East.

So let's start. I was born into a protestant working class family in East Belfast in the 1950s, was the first in my family to trot off to the local university, Queens in Belfast, where I arrived in 1970. I went up to university to study English literature. Seamus Heaney was then a young lecturer in the English department, but I soon converted to history. And over the course of my four year degree, there were over 1,000 people killed in what came to be known as the Troubles. Those years were the worst four years of violence during the entire 30 year conflict, which ran from the 1960s to the late 1990s.

My almost surreal memories of those years are of endless city center bombs, tit for tat revenge killings, young men with masks and automatic weapons in their ubiquitous paramilitary organizations, highly emotional university meetings, as in the one on the Monday after Bloody Sunday, when members of the Queens Civil Rights Organization came back to report on what the paratroopers had done in Derry on that infamous day in 1972.

Memories of armed soldiers and armored cars patrolling the streets, and a seemingly endless succession of funerals through wet and gray urban landscapes or deep green, melancholic country lanes. The funerals were the worst. The endless cycle of raw grief seemed to symbolize the sheer pointlessness of it all. Seamus Heaney's poem The Cure at Troy poignantly captures the reality that human grief is equally painful on both sides of the conflict.

He writes, "A hunger strikers father stands in the graveyard dam, the police widow unveils faints at the funeral home." So whether you're an IRA hunger striker or a police widow, the experience of grief among families is really palpably the same. During my student years, I naively thought we were witnessing the last of the world's religious, ethnic conflicts, a kind of final paroxysm of the European wars of religion, the last frontier of the Protestant Reformation.

On an offshore island, off an offshore island, I thought it was the sheer provincialism of Northern Ireland that created the problem. But, of course, I was wrong. Far from being the death throes of a dying phenomenon the conflict in Northern Ireland was a part of a wider international trend that also brought destructive violence to the old former Yugoslavia in the Middle East and to many, many other parts of the world.

Now, this evening, I don't want to say too much about the deeper reasons for the conflict or why it broke out in 1968, and because our main subject is just peace and peacemaking. But I should pause for a moment to supply some conceptual organizing principles. Otherwise, peacemaking without a context doesn't really make very much sense. So I'm going to try and share a screen now to help us through some of this material. And I hope you can see that. And I'll just move on to the second slide.

So what created the problem in Ireland and why has it proved so intractable? So there's all kinds of ways of thinking about this. Is it owing to the reformation and its Irish dimensions, the fact that the Northern part of the island became Protestant and the Southern part of the island remained Roman Catholic? Is it really about the rise of nationalism and the impact of the First World War?

Is it a story of colonialism, colonization, plantation and land transfer? Is it about the weaknesses of partition as a solution to all problems? It's a kind of frequent reprise among countries in the old British Empire that problems that were partly solved by partition almost never were fully successful. Or is it a problem of political and economic power differential? So that in the North of Ireland there was widely perceived discrimination and inequalities in the distribution of political and economic power.

So what conceptual organizing principles then make the most sense? Is it a religious problem? Is it an imperial/colonial problem? Is it an identity problem based on competing nationalisms? Is it a problem of poor governance in the past partition? Is it a social and economic justice problem around issues of equality? Is it a problem of cultural antagonism and disrespect among two communities who just didn't get on very well together? Is it a terrorism problem created by sections of the population reverting to paramilitary violence?

Well, the answer is, all of the above actually has to be factored in. And this is one of the things I most want to get across this evening is that problems that emerge violently and have been around for a while are generally very complicated. Otherwise, they would have been sorted out much earlier. So having a sense I mean, this very quick introduction is really an attempt to show the overlapping issues.

And sometimes when I'm teaching this to students, have the image of those sedimentary rock deposits that if you see a slice of a Rift Valley, you see there's layer after layer, after layer, after layer of different kinds of rock. And these are the layers of the Northern Ireland problem. They go back a very long time, at least until the Reformation, and they have many dimensions after that.

So why then specifically, was there an outbreak of violence in 1968? So given that the sedimentary rocks are in place. And so on, what pushed the society into violence? Now, this might seem like an easy question to answer, but it's really not that easy. For most of us growing up, I was a schoolboy doing my thing in 1967, 1968, and to all intents and purposes, it seemed like a reasonably normal Western European democracy. Yet within a year hell had broken loose.

And of course, it's easier in retrospect to see what the specific triggers were, but not really that easy at the time. And it's still not entirely easy to figure out how this happened. There are a number of things one can say that what was going on in Northern Ireland was a wider international campaign for civil rights for minorities, some of the tunes and hymns and expressions of the American Civil rights movement were reproduced in Northern Ireland. And there was a sense in which the old Unionist Ascendancy was under threat from those campaigning for a more just and equal society in Northern Ireland.

One might say that this was met by insensitive and violent policing directed by a discriminatory regime and sometimes made worse by the rhetoric of religious actors, including the fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. was it really created by sectarianism and confessional cleansing, the beginnings of people being burnt out of their homes and moved out because they were of one religion or another? Especially Catholics were burnt out of their homes in West Belfast. Was is that the mobilization of paramilitary organizations on both sides once you start having militias being armed, then you've got a serious problem?

And most of the inability of governments to contain the violence from escalating. That was one of the prime reasons for this. But for whatever reason, the troubles did break out. Now, living through the troubles in Ireland as a young student was not the happiest experience of my life. And there were many times that I wished I were somewhere else and that I'd gone to university somewhere else. It was however, a remarkably formative experience. It was an environment that demanded attention, serious thought, and critical self-reflection. It wasn't just a student environment where you showed up erratically for class and play some sport and went to some concerts in the evening.

It was out there, there was serious things going on around you, and it forced you to pay attention to the different narratives underpinning the conflict. Because one thing I learned very early on is that the respective narratives that sustain conflict are often internally cohesive and coherent. They just happen to be incompatible with other narratives that operate from a different set of presuppositions.

I feel sure I would not be an academic historian without having lived through the troubles. It taught me to care, to figure out what was going on, to delve into the past, and to do it with an attempt to try and see many different points of view. Not just mine or not just the dominant ones.

To help communicate some of the fruits of that reflection, I want to borrow from Errol Morris's famous documentary, in which US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam era, Robert McNamara gave his famous 11 reflections on the fog of war. And this is the title of today's talk. Some of these reflections have become classics of foreign policy realism. Things like, empathize with your enemy, rationality will not save us, belief in seeing are often both wrong, never say never, and finally, you can't change human nature.

Now, here are my own 11 reflections on religious and ethnic conflict, to which all I will add some direct comments on their relevance to us and to Harvard more generally. I offer these in the knowledge that every conflict is an important way, is distinctive and unique, but there are also repetitive tropes. The first is, religious and ethnic conflicts are more complicated than you think, and are often more complicated than so-called experts also think. As I said before, problems do not become intractable if easy solutions are available.

Religious conflicts often arise from a large number of interconnected causalities, as we've already seen. Ownership of land and territory, ancient settlement patterns, competing religious and/or ethnic identities, differential access to economic or social power, existence of long-standing grievances reinforced by emotive symbols, rituals, celebrations and memories. Residential and cultural separations even segregation's, selective access to different information streams, competing nationalisms and political aspirations, differential senses of divine empowerment, highly selective readings of history and of sacred texts, and so on and so on.

So beware of monocausal explanations or universalizing theoretical or ideological constructions. Beware also of the condescension of outsiders who only know half of what it's like to live in conflict zones. I used to get frustrated as a student with the repeated visitors to Northern Ireland delegations and deputations and well-meaning people who thought they had the key to all the mysteries.

In Northern Ireland, old colonial settlement patterns had separated protestants and Catholics, generated different religious and cultural systems and competing nationalisms by the end of the 19th century. Crudely speaking, one side saw themselves as Protestant and British, the other as Catholic and Irish. One side had most of the political and economic power. The other was discriminated against and felt alienated. One community was a minority in Northern Ireland, Roman Catholics. The other was a minority on the island of Ireland, Protestants.

The insecurities caused by double minorities and double majorities, depending on the geographical selection of each side, helped create the vortex of conflict in Northern Ireland. Secondly, stereotyping is ubiquitous. Demonizing the other is the first major step in rendering them him deserving of attack or elimination. Most stereotyping of the other has some basis in observable facts and behaviors. Otherwise, the stereotypes would not exist in the first place, but they are always horribly distorted to suit the prejudices of one side or the other.

It is perhaps the most dangerous human trait in our world and needs to be confronted with relentless vigor. In Northern Ireland, Protestants thought Roman Catholics were enslaved to their church, prone to having large families, feckless when it came to work, and deeply subversive of the state. Roman Catholics saw Protestants as stiff-necked colonists, eager for dominance, discriminatory in their exercise of power, and humorless in their cultural expressions.

Now, both sets of stereotypes had just enough truth in them to make them work, but not enough for either side to understand the complex dynamics that sustain them. Thirdly, violence radicalizes people. Violence is often triggered by the crossing of symbolic or real boundaries and generates a momentum of its own. One side generally has more access to state instruments of power and the other resorts to terrorism. Deaths and funerals stoke emotional intensity and set up demands for revenge.

Once conflict start, no one knows when and how they will develop. Things may seem bad in conflict zones, but you always know they can get a whole lot worse. As a person living in Belfast, I came to believe that violence is a terrible solution to human conflicts. If you get a chance and look at the five program series called Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, I think it may be on Netflix here.

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, it's a set of interviews of people who got involved in the troubles in some way or another. And what comes out loud and clear from it is that people who engaged in violence in the early 70s and 80s were scarred for life by it. And often had tremendous trouble coming to terms with it later in life. Sometimes dependent on drugs or alcohol, sometimes mental health issues of a serious kind.

Violence is something that those engage in and defended at the time, but in the long course of their lives. Some of course, do continue thinking that violence was the right way to go. But very large numbers of people see it for what it is. It is sobering to recognize now that there have been more deaths attributed to suicide in Northern Ireland than the 25 years after 1998 than in the whole duration of the troubles, and that Northern Ireland has now one of the worst drug problems in Europe, and societies that descend into violence are not easily rescued.

Fourthly, religious and ethnic conflict put enormous pressure on the law and legal systems. Religious traditions often have different histories of legal interpretation and enforcement, and under pressures of violence, states often start shifting the balance between state security and individual rights.

So this has happened in Northern Ireland. Governments set up special courts because of the difficulties of getting evidence. We had internment without trial, locking up people because they were regarded as contributing to the violence, even though they weren't tried in proper courts with proper evidence, use of informants and so on.

One of my colleagues in Queen's [INAUDIBLE] who now runs the Mitchell Center in Queens and celebrating the work of Senator George Mitchell, has just brought out a book on the way states respond to terrorism and asking the question, is counterterrorism successful?

And one of the conclusions of that book is that sometimes it is and sometimes it's not, especially when it goes over the top in doing things that simply alienate more people and make it more difficult to find a solution. Much of the bending of legal systems ends badly and makes the situation worse. Internment without trial had disastrous consequences in Northern Ireland and has sullied the reputation of the United Kingdom on the international stage.

Fifthly, a zero sum game. Many people inside conflict zones see the conflict as a zero sum game. Few outside see it that way. So the most perplexing feature of conflict zones to outsiders is the apparent propensity of participants in conflicts to see their situation as a zero sum game worth dying for rather than a problem that needs resolving in the spirit of half a loaf is better than no bread. But people inside conflict zones, people who see no other options for themselves, are literally people without options.

Sixthly, it's easy to be wise after the event. Before conflict breaks out, things may seem entirely normal. After it breaks out, people see more clearly the structural problems that caused the conflict in the first place.

There's nothing about conflict that is inevitable, and there is nothing guaranteed about peace and stability. There is often a fragile veneer of civility in societies, which can be stripped with distressing speed and consequences. This can happen in any community, anywhere.

Seventh, living in conflict zones requires individuals to make moral choices on a regular basis. How one works to maintain human values in the midst of inhumane acts is a constant struggle to define one's humanity. Part of that involves serious evaluation and criticism of one's own community and traditions, perhaps even of one's own family traditions and voting behavior.

This can be emotionally painful and intellectually challenging. The constant struggle for understanding and empathy for those on the other side is both profoundly difficult, but also deeply rewarding. Finding solid ground upon which to make judgments about what is happening around you is really extremely difficult, not least because each side has access to different media and information streams.

But peacemaking begins here. One additional caution-- I came to be wary of people who claim to have or appeal to moral clarity in conflict zones, when very often it only represented moral clarity about the wrongs inflicted upon one's own tradition while not dealing with those inflicted on the other.

Eighth, social and economic misery stokes conflict and mixed peace, making much more difficult. The reverse is also the case, especially economic opportunities for young people, particularly young men. Peacemaking needs to be backed by considerable economic resources. There are few things more dangerous in any society than the existence of large numbers of unemployed young males, angry about their own lives and eager for revenge against the alleged causes of their disaffection. Hence, a serious appreciation of the economic dimensions of conflict and their resolution is vital. Money and development cannot solve ethnic and religious conflicts, but they cannot be solved without them.

Ninth, leadership matters. Political and religious leaders at all levels have the capacity either to make things a whole lot better or a whole lot worse. Mid-level clerics are self-appointed demagogues who lead communities can have a devastatingly bad influence in conflict zones. The appeal to sacred texts, historic traditions, and authenticity can set up the kind of ideological fervor that leads inexorably to violence.

But fortunately, the reverse is also the case. Wise and morally courageous leaders can have surprisingly strong influence. And here and maybe later, I can pay tribute to George Mitchell, who was President Clinton's envoy to Northern Ireland and chaired the committees leading up to the Good Friday Agreement. Mitchell was an amazing person. If you read his autobiography or his book, Negotiation, you have a sense of patient wisdom, humor, genuine care.

Soon after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, there was a terrible bombing carried out by the real IRA and Omagh, where there were 29 people killed, I think in a market town in the West of part of Northern Ireland. And Mitchell was devastated by it. It came, I think, about four or five months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. And he came over to Omagh and met with the people there. And some of his descriptions of his encounters with people who had lost-- one man who had lost his pregnant wife and child and mother. One young woman who lost both of her eyes.

And Mitchell's humane, caring, deeply effective and temperament, I think, earned him an enormous amount of street cred in Northern Ireland on both sides of the divide. And there were also cameo roles played by the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bertie Hur, the Southern Taoiseach, and also by the leaders of the political parties, especially David Trimble and John Hume, who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tensely, peacemaking is a process not a result. Settlements can be refined over years, even decades, but be aware of ongoing dynamics that are making the problems even worse. In Northern Ireland, important contributions to peacemaking were made by women's groups, by those who maintain professional standards and law, education, and medicine by religious groups, who brokered reconciliation, by creative artists who built cultural bridges, and by groups of concerned citizens who came together for shared purposes, for example, disability, and housing groups, people trying to make their local communities a little better. Everyone has a stake and a role in peacemaking in divided societies. Everyone counts. Every action counts, either positively or negatively. Either making the situation better or you're making it worse.

Finally, under this, history and experience makes you pessimistic. But very occasionally the human desire for peace and justice surprises you. In The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney writes, history says don't hope on this side of the grave. But then once in a lifetime, the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme. One of the most perplexing issues I struggled with in Ireland is that a combination of my own pessimistic temperament and a deep historical training in the roots of the Irish conflict made me congenitally skeptical, even cynical, about any possible way out of the conflict that did not represent the ultimate victory of one side over the other. So in dark moments, I also thought that it was a zero sum game.

Now things are still far from perfectly settled in Northern Ireland. Residential segregation is unacceptably high. The educational system is still divided. Structural discrimination still exists. The Peace Wall in Belfast is still standing. Periodic bouts of rioting still take place. Some paramilitary organizations still mount bombings and shootings. Violence against women is shockingly high. And the economy lags in tandem with most of the rest of Europe.

But if someone had told me in the 1970s that one day a power sharing administration would emerge in Northern Ireland to govern the place with the Protestant fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley as first minister and the one time member of the Provisional IRA, Martin McGuinness, as his deputy first minister, I would have questioned your sanity.

So things are better, but far from perfect. Right now the first minister representing Sinn Féin is a woman, as is the deputy first minister representing the DUP. They have very different ideological agendas, but they respect one another. This summer I toured many of the working class districts of Protestant and Catholic Belfast. The old divisive murals, flags and emblems are still there, provocatively declaring ownership of territory.

But there are also some new murals, not always with neighborhood support, but paying homage to concepts of social justice, the dignity of labor, community pride and human rights. These concepts have not triumphed universally, but at least they are visibly there. OK, so those are the reflections of living through this. But so what about peacemaking? And let's start with the Good Friday Agreement.

Now, the text of the Good Friday Agreement really two agreements first between most of the political parties in Northern Ireland and the second between the British and Irish governments, is quite a complicated piece of political draftsmanship worthy of attention in its own right. So it's worth reading. But for present purposes, I want to outline five of its most important principles, and then five of the most important reasons for its relative success. Now, I think these principles, I think although they are somewhat unique to Northern Ireland, I think these do feed into general principles about just peace and about just peacemaking.

The first principle I would list is identity accommodations. Although the Irish border was to remain in place, citizens of Northern Ireland could thereafter identify either as British or Irish and can hold passports in both states. So residents of Northern Ireland can hold an Irish passport can hold a British passport. I held both actually, when I was there.

Moreover, both the British and Irish governments made alterations to their constitutions and laws to state that the future destiny of Northern Ireland could only be decided by a majority of its citizens, expressed in a referendum. Now, admittedly, all of this was easier to accept. While both the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic remained within the European Union, which was a great help to peace making because both the states involved in the conflict were members of the European Union.

And that was a shared identity. It was a shared common market for trade and goods and so on. But these identity accommodations that allowed people living in the same place to count themselves as either British or Irish, and I think was a way of allowing people to have their identity aspirations fulfilled without fighting over them.

Secondly, institutional creativity and the exercise of power. The agreement was a very sophisticated piece of political theory engineering. It created a new Northern Ireland Assembly with a power sharing executive. And the power sharing executive was comprised of ministers put in place through a very complicated system of proportional representation.

So it created a new Northern Ireland Assembly, a power sharing executive, intergovernmental relations between North and South Ireland and between Britain and Ireland. The so-called three strands approach, in other words, power sharing in the North between the two communities, a North South dimension, intergovernmental relations between Northern and Southern politicians, and then a dimension between Britain and Ireland. And this so-called three strands was a way of negotiating the complex political realities of Northern Ireland.

Thirdly, instruments of violence. The agreements made provision for the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, the scaling down of the British military presence, the release of paramilitary prisoners, and the reform of the police force. All of these were vital. All were complicated. All were controversial. All took time.

So getting rid of the weapons, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons is a very difficult thing to do. People don't want to give up their weapons until they have some assurance that the new piece is going to work, and that they're not going to be attacked again. And it took time both for the loyalist paramilitary organizations and the Republican paramilitary organizations to give up their weapons. So that was a slow process.

The loyalists, some loyalist groups, didn't give up their weapons verifiably for a decade after the Good Friday Agreement. And this was to be-- as paramilitary weapons were decommissioned, the scaling down of the British military presence would also happen so that there would be fewer checkpoints, fewer army barracks, fewer troops on the streets, fewer provocative incidents involving British troops and local populations.

And then there was to be a release of paramilitary prisoners. This is extremely controversial. Many people felt that those had been put in prison for committing acts of violence deserve to be in prison, that they were criminals, not political activists. So there were over 400 prisoners freed as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. That still remains a controversial decision.

And then the reform of the police force to make it more acceptable to both communities, the police force before the troubles broke out and during the Troubles, was widely perceived to be a sectarian force mostly Protestant, not well received in Catholic areas, and so had to change that. It was extremely important.

Fourthly, this concept of parity of esteem and this phrase appears four times in the document, the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement made explicit provision for an end to discriminatory practices and the affirmation of the linguistic and cultural distinctive characteristics of the two communities. So this idea of parity of esteem is a very powerful idea, actually, that each community is equal in esteem and perceived to be so and recognized to be so.

And then finally, consent and deferment. The Good Friday Agreement had to be ratified by referendums both North and South. In the South, the referendum was to amend articles two and three of the Republic's Constitution, claiming jurisdiction over Northern Ireland. And 94.4% of people in the South voted to accept that, voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement in the North it was a referendum on the agreement itself.

71% of Northern Ireland people voted to accept the Good Friday Agreement, including almost all Catholics and 57% of Protestants. So there was more of a buy in from the Catholic side than the Protestant side from the start, but it was nevertheless still a majority of Protestants voted for it.

So that principle of consent, I think, is very important, that it wasn't simply imposed that there was a referendum to ratify it, choose it, own it. And then deferment. The agreement fudged or deferred some of the most vexing problems, especially the border. The border was to remain. And given that IRA and other nationalist paramilitary organizations had fought a long, bitter campaign to get rid of the border. The fact that the border remained was itself, complicated issue.

So the border remained. Demilitarization still had to take place. Police reform still had to be handled. How would power sharing work in practice between deeply divided parties and communities? And, there were any numbers of ups and downs since the times and the power sharing executive has collapsed innumerable times, it's been patched together innumerable times. In fact, some argue that the very existence of a power sharing executive institutionalizes sectarianism by giving designated seats to political representatives from two sides of the divide. And later, of course, Brexit became an additional unexpected ghost in the machine.

So why did the Good Friday Agreement succeed, relatively speaking, when previous attempts at a settlement failed? And there were any number of settlements tried from Sunningdale Agreement early on to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, any number of peace talks and so on, none of which delivered until this one. So why did this succeed when others had failed? And even if you accept that it was a limited success, why did it succeed at all when previous attempts at a settlement failed?

And I think they're five or six things we can say about this generic category that I called atmospheric change. I think by 1998, there was a good deal of violence, fatigue in Northern Ireland. People were fed up with the troubles, with violence, with the day-to-day realities of security checks and armed soldiers and so on. And a lot of the people who had been involved in the early stages of the troubles and the paramilitary organizations in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, were quite old men by the late 1990s. And there was a sober realization that what had all this achieved, actually, at the end of the day?

So some violence, fatigue, which is you can see in the slide here no more and you can read the words, this is no more bombing, no more killing, no more standing at that lines, no more having to bury the people we love no more et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there was an atmospheric change. There had been any number of cross-community ecumenical initiatives that had been a very important participatory democracy project.

One of my students, an undergraduate at Harvard, wrote a very fine paper on the Opsahl Commission, which was an experiment in participatory democracy, in getting people from all over the province to give them their voice about what they thought should happen in Northern Ireland. There were all kinds of cultural improvement, growing paramilitary realism. All of these things, I think, produced a somewhat different atmosphere by 1998.

Leadership matters. Mitchell, Hur, Blair, Trimble and Hume all of these people played a tremendous role and at times a costly role. I mean, Mitchell gave up a lot of his family time to be in Northern Ireland. And Trimble and Hume took great risks in trying to deliver their parties to the peace process. Both paid for it. And both of the parties that they led are now minority parties in Northern Ireland, the official unionists and the Social Democratic and Labor Party. So they won the Nobel Peace Prize, but they essentially lost power in their own province over time.

But leadership matters. I mean, Mitchell, in his autobiography, mentions that the Good Friday Agreement was due to be signed at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. And at a 4:45, he still hadn't heard from the official unions, whether they were going to sign up or not. It was literally a down to the wire of the wire of the wire before people signed on to it. And there was a sense, people were up through the night, the night before trying to negotiate and find common ground.

So this was on a knife edge to the very, very end. And of course, some parties the DUP, the Democratic Unionist Party was established by Ian Paisley. Didn't sign up to it. But there was enough signing up to make it work. And I think this third point is extremely important. External support. Support from outside Northern Ireland.

There was widespread agreement in the major capitals Washington, London, Dublin, the European Union, Brussels, about what a peace agreement is likely to look like. In other words, long before the Good Friday Peace Agreement. The basic LEGO bricks were clear to everyone that the border couldn't go without a referendum. There had to be power sharing. There had to be an end to discrimination. There had to be an acceptable police force. There had to be. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

So the fact that all the major players, American president, the British Prime Minister, the Taoiseach in the Republic of Ireland, the European Union, all were supporting this made an enormous difference. All were more or less on the same wavelength, and all more or less, put up some resources to help it succeed. And that's the next point.

Economic investment, both from within Northern Ireland, but crucially, from outside as well. Belfast is an unrecognizable city today from what it was in the 1970s when it was a very bleak, grim cityscape. If you go now, I think you'll be really surprised as to the beauty of the landscape and the beauty of the buildings that have been put up and the sense of economic energy that's there. I mean, not all problems have been solved, but it's really a before and after story.

Persistence and luck. I mean, sometimes we historians or analysts or political scientists. See the cleverness of the settlement or they the violence, fatigue or something like that. But really the fact that Mitchell was at a 4:45 on the day the agreement was signed still didn't know if it was going to come off. There's an element of unpredictability, luck, events going your way and persistence, of course, is a bit like sports coaches say this all the time that you make your own luck through persistence and planning and so on, and there is that as well.

And then there was an acceptance, I think, by many people in the province and by the leadership, by people like Mitchell himself, that this was a good agreement, but not a perfect agreement. And we're determined not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And the times that a settlement of this kind is certainly a lot better than none at all.

So why is peace fragile and why is Brexit such a threat? The border remains. Peace did not bring community reconciliation. Educational and residential segregation persists. Most Catholics and Protestants go to separate schools still often live in different areas. The peace dividend for the working classes never fully materialized, and the role of the European Union in mediating identity has obviously gone down the tubes, and the continuing, relentless partisanship and institutional breakdown are still there.

So it's not a completely successful story, but a largely successful story. So in conclusion, then what general themes about religion, Justice, and peacemaking emerge from the Irish conflict? The first is that there are no moral miracles in history. Northern Ireland is a more just and peaceful society now than it was when I was a university student there in the 70s. It's far from perfect now, nor is it beyond the bounds of possibility that it might descend into communal violence again. Justice and peace are not absolute categories, but they are always works in progress.

These are fragile species in the human landscapes of violence, domination and intolerance. Moreover, violence has cast a long shadow over Northern Ireland in terms of continuing elevated levels of violence and suicide rates. If I had to highlight just a few things I've learned about just peace from Northern Ireland, here's what I would say.

Oppression and violence are handmaids, and they always make things worse. Peacemaking requires empathy, compassion, creativity, and generosity of spirit as much as political will and clever policy making. Mitchell's own reflection, reflection on peacemaking goes like this quote, "The most difficult obstacle to overcome is lack of trust. You can rebuild buildings, you can replace vehicles, you can put bridges back up. But the really important thing to change what is in people's hearts and minds takes very much longer."

So I conclude then with the words of my fellow countryman Seamus Heaney, whose family tradition in Northern Ireland, as it happens, was on the other side of mine. And when he writes, so hope for a great sea change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing Wells. So that's it from me. So I'm over to you, David, for some questions and discussion.

DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you, Professor Hempton, very much for an illuminating and even moving discussion of that history and of the lessons that you've drawn from it. You've done an exceptional job of maintaining that balance between a historian's particularizing care and a moral reflection that's of broad relevance for all of us. So thank you very much for that presentation. Thank you.

It struck me that early on in your reflections tonight, one of the points of comparison, you talked about a double minoritization in this conflict where depending on your perspective, you were the one outnumbered. And certainly we see in Israel-Palestine from the Palestinian perspective, there's a minority position within Israel-Palestine. From the Israel perspective, there's a minority position in the larger Arab world, and each feels that threat.

So that's an interesting point of comparison from your description of the Northern Ireland situation. And maybe what it calls for is an ability to understand those ideological narratives, even if they are incompatible. There's no progress before at least comprehending them.

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, I do think that's right. I mean, I think the effort that needs to be made to step outside one's own narrative of what's happening, to at least understand what the other side. I mean, you can go through life just believing that the other side is just wicked and evil and that. And then you see it as a zero sum game. You either have to win or you lose.

But if you move beyond that to think that the people opposing you have a reason, whether you agree with the reason or not. They have a reason. And to try and figure out what it is. And if there is any way of satisfying different aspirations and identities, then that can be a very helpful thing.

But I almost fear to get into different areas because I do think that. There are obviously substantial differences. But one thing that you did mention I think is a similarity. Is that the shape of the demography. And one of the things that in Northern Ireland created a lot of unease amongst Northern Ireland's Protestants was the daily realization that the demography in Northern Ireland was shifting away from them, that the old Protestant numerical ascendancy that came out of the formation of the Northern Ireland state in 1922 was very different from what it is now.

There's a slow, steady growth in the Catholic population with a higher fertility rates consistently over time. And that sense of slowly being outnumbered or slowly losing control generates a lot of tension and fear, I think, among people. And similarly, just where is the demography going to and who's going to be calling the shots in 10 or 20 or 30 years time? These are big questions.

DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you. We could spend a lot of time on the differences. One of our questioners asking about 20 differences between Ireland and hotspots in the Middle East. And there's so much to say about the particularity and appreciate the care that you've taken in identifying those and reminding us of the contextual sensitivity of every human story.

Maybe just in conclusion, David, we use the term just peace in regard to this webinar series and Harvard Divinity Schools own aspiration for its influence in the world. Do the residents of Northern Ireland feel like just peace has been achieved?

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, that's a great question. I think the residents of Northern Ireland believe that life is enormously better now than it was 40 years ago. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think Brexit has thrown a ghost into the machine, which is a potentially troublesome because while both countries were in the European Union, there was a shared identity.

Even simple things. When I was at Queen's we settled on an anthem to be played at graduation, and we chose the European anthem Ode to Joy. That would be probably more difficult to do now, I don't know how they figured that out now, but so the European Union, I think, or the Brexit vote, I think has made it problematic. I mean, as you probably know, a majority of Catholics in Northern Ireland voted to remain in Europe and a majority of Protestants voted to leave.

So that sectarianism played itself out even in the Brexit vote. And it's played itself out in any number of conflicts about trade and customs and borders. And how do goods move from Britain to Northern Ireland to the Irish republic. And is there a hard border or soft border, or is it operating in the Irish sea, or does it operate somewhere else? These are endless. These have caused row after row after row.

So many people in Northern Ireland take different views on that still. But is it better? Yes. Would most people trade their lives now for what they were in the early 1970s? No. So even we still go back to Northern Ireland quite a bit. Our families live there and it's so much, it's not perfect, far from it, but it's really so much better than the daily litany of bombings and tit for tat murders and just endless spiral of terrible violence.

DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you very much. We appreciate this rich and personally moving and intellectually illuminating set of reflections. And for your candid and careful responses to our excellent questions tonight. It's been really rewarding to be a part of this. I would just remind our audience of our fourth and final session in the webinar series, which will be our plenary session on March 10th, when all three of our presenters, Professor McGee, Professor Reed, and Professor Hempton will be in conversation with one another about the pursuit of just peace. And we look forward to seeing you then. Thanks again. Have a good evening.