Place leadership has come to be seen as the ‘missing factor of the regional development puzzle’ (Sotarauta et al, 2017), but how such leadership operates in environments of conflict and contestation is still poorly understood. Using Northern Ireland as an illustrative case, recent research has sought to better understand how place leadership dynamics manifest when histories of division and competing processes of constitutional ambition disrupt ‘ordinary’ political and regional development.
Northern Ireland has often been thought of as a political and cultural corridor through which Britishness and Irishness pass in an uneasy space (Longley, 1993). The unsettled nature of the region as both a contested political entity and a society emerging from conflict has been used as an argument for conflict transformation to sit at the heart of regional economic development. Indeed, post the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, a huge range of initiatives from institutional structures to EU funding, to community-based engagement have been deliberately fashioned to reflect the cooperative challenge for place leaders of both regional development and peacebuilding. However, the outworking of the UK’s exit from the EU, with a concurrent destabilisation of the political process and resurgence of political conflict, has ‘upended’ NI’s post-conflict order and occasioned acute levels of instability not seen since before the 1998 Agreement (Murray, 2024). Our research identified four overarching themes significantly present in the Northern Ireland case and placed leadership in contestation more generally. We illustrate that such leadership is episodic in these conditions and as such ebbs and flows depending on the omnibus environment; we identified a tension between communities of identity and communities of place which makes it difficult to enact conventional notions of place leadership; we saw unsurprisingly that trans-border dynamics feature strongly in the reality of place leadership on the ground; and we noted that often in such environments the focus is less on growth and much more on basic stability in the present.
These themes allowed us to better make sense of the leader (ship) dynamics of place in contestation, and we identified three relevant dynamics that are worth contemplation. The first of these is the underlying structural legacy of conflict itself, which contains within it the potential for the past to ‘trip up’ the present. For leaders, the challenge is to manage persistent skirmishes while not retreating to the ‘defensive communitas’ of division. More significantly, the ongoing role of violent actors and those who seek to speak for them is an overlooked characteristic of how the past is managed in the present in such contexts. The second dynamic might be termed ‘everyday’ leader engagement, similar but with a different complexion to place leadership in more settled locations. This focuses on the need to ‘sense make’ for the future (Weick, 1995), beyond single community identities. At the forefront of this challenge is a requirement to avoid behaviour, actions or practices which feed cycles of contestation. Developing approaches to place leadership which feed into a virtuous cycle of cohesion building is difficult and goes significantly beyond already complex leadership tasks in more settled locations.
The third ‘overlaying’ dynamic is that of the ‘existential’ issue of contested borders. In times of significant transition, leadership actors inevitably become embroiled in public deliberations of maintaining current constitutional arrangements or working towards new constitutional futures. Navigating uncertainty is perhaps the greatest challenge for leaders and requires practices that are nuanced and long-term. When constitutional futures are seen as fluid and up for grabs, the leadership mission is acute.
The Northern Ireland case demonstrates the need for place leaders and leadership actors more generally to demonstrate not just functional capacity but a degree of vision and insight into the complex challenge of ‘getting past the past’ (Heifetz et al, 2009). This case is far from unique, and insights from the region have relevance for other places with liminal dynamics and conflict histories, not to mention other locations where conflict is still ‘hot’ and where the idea(s) and practices at the heart of place leadership may be even more valuable.
You can read more about this work at:
Murphy, J., & McDowell, S. (2025). Dilemmas, limitations and challenges of place leadership: instability and transitional dynamics in post-Brexit Northern Ireland. Regional Studies, 59 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2025.2490024
Offline References
Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.
Longley, E. (Ed.). (1993). A citizen’s enquiry. Lilliput Press.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. SAGE Publications.
Connect with the Author
Joanne Murphy is Chair of Inclusive Leadership at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her research explores leadership, change and organisational development in political volatility, including environments affected by ethno-political conflict, violence and disorder. Her latest book is ‘Management and War: How Organisations Navigate Conflict and Build Peace’(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
: Joanne Murphy
: changeresearch.bsky.social
: changeresearch
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