Thomas Wilson

THOMAS M. WILSON, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, was approved funding in October 2018 to aid research on “Hard and Soft Borders, Identities and Governance in Brexit Northern Ireland.” This ethnographic project investigated the strategies employed by private and public stakeholders in South Armagh in the borderlands of Northern Ireland to resist or reconfigure Brexit, Britain’s exit from the European Union, a process that began in 2016 and formally occurred in 2020. The research concluded that Europeanization had softened and splintered many of the previously recognized “hard” identities (of Republicanism and Loyalism) in the region, particularly among the Irish Nationalist majority. The project also chronicled the effects of what had been planned as a closed or “hard” border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the most likely outcome of Brexit because of the UK’s departure from the EU’s single market and customs union. However, in a negotiated protocol between the UK and the EU, Northern Ireland remains in the single market and customs union, unlike the rest of the UK. This has put serious pressure on the transnational governance and peace process that had begun in 1998 because Brexit, as a political process and social experiment, has undermined many aspects of the “banal Europeanism” that has positively affected the economy, society, culture and politics of NI.