Leading without Leadership: Place, Instability and Transborder dynamics in post-Brexit Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has often been thought of as a political and cultural corridor, through which Britishness and Irishness pass through in an uneasy space (Longley, 1993). The liminal nature of the region (Murphy & McDowell, 2019) as both a contested political entity and as a society emerging from conflict has been used as an argument for the necessity of representative government which was locally rooted in place and space. In response, post Belfast/Good Friday Agreement legislative structures have been constructed to reflect the shared challenge of governance and peacebuilding. More recently, the region has been trapped in the transitional space of Brexit and a resurgence of political conflict. The UK’s exit from the EU and the renewed wrangling over frontiers, identity and place have occasioned acute levels of instability not seen since before the 1998 Agreement. While the stop-start nature of the devolved Stormont Assembly has always reflected ongoing political precariousness, the outworking of the UK’s exit from the EU has put new and seemingly unsustainable pressures on what has always been fragile governance. Backtracking on the NI Protocol, Tory infighting, the fractious relationship between the EU and the British government, and the breakdown of a peace process consensus between the Irish and British governments has led to political stalemate. The Northern Ireland power sharing executive has collapsed with a failure to agree on a First Minister and Deputy First Minister. The Legislative Assembly has ceased to function leaving the civil service in charge of governance. All of this has left a legislative, governance and democratic vacuum. In addition, the changing meaning of the Irish border and the reimagining of Northern Ireland’s relationship with the UK and the EU has resulted in a reinvigorated public discourse on its constitutional future. Other concerns such as the cost-of-living crisis and a health service with the worst outcomes in the UK remain unaddressed. Using Northern Ireland as an illustrative case, this paper explores what happens to place-based leadership in a politically leaderless place.

We contend that as notions of place themselves shift and change in the face of transitional forces, so does the meaning of place-based leadership. As debates move away from impotent political institutions and positional roles, other actors - individual and organisational - ‘step up’ and ‘step in’ to practice leadership at multiple levels, through institutional necessity or political opportunity. The paper explores this process through an analysis of Northern Ireland as a liminal space – betwixt and between Britain and Ireland, economically within and outside the EU and neither at conflict nor at peace with itself. We draw on three sets of data. The first is a series of semi-structured interviews with Northern Ireland political figures and key sector stakeholders conducted over a six year period (2016-2022). The second is an analysis of parliamentary discourse around NI leadership in three parliaments: the national parliaments of Westminster (UK), and the Oireachtas (RoI), and the regional devolved Northern Ireland Assembly. The third is an analysis of public commentary in and around leadership in Northern Ireland itself over the same period. The paper concludes with a discussion on the nature and diversity of place-based leadership in the liminal space of Northern Ireland and what this experience tells us about place-based leadership more generally in transitional environments.


LONGLEY, E. (ed.) 1993. A Citizen's Enquiry, Dublin: Lilliput Press.
MURPHY, J. & MCDOWELL, S. 2019. Transitional optics: Exploring liminal spaces after conflict. Urban Studies, 56, 2499-2514.