Request for advice - Master's thesis research

Hello r/belfast!

I am a master's student of European Studies from Belgium. For my master's thesis I am writing about current perceptions of peace and peacebuilding in (West-) Belfast. My main question is the following: "How do residents and community actors in West Belfast experience the outcomes of the Good Friday Agreement?

From March 22-27 I'll be in Belfast to, hopefully, conduct interviews with people about their thoughts and perceptions about the GFA, current peacebuilding projects, peacebuilding obstacles, or any other thing that could be of relevance.

Interviews will be informal and open-ended and won't take long. I am not really looking for a specific background (except that it would be good for the fairness of my data to interview people from both a protestant-unionist and a catholic-republican background).

I am writing this to ask if there are members of this sub who have an idea in what direction I should be heading to contact any potential interviewees. Are there any organisations/institutions that you know of? Or, if people are willing to be interviewed themselves, would you want to meet up during that week? This can be as low-key and informal as you'd like. I have the whole week off.

All data will be completely anonymised, protected, and the research as a whole will not be made publicly available.

If anyone is interested to know who I am -> My name is Ale (yes, really. It's Frisian.) I'm a student originally from Groningen, Netherlands. My motivation for this research is that I wanted to challenge myself to conduct 'real' research on-site instead of remaining in an academic bubble studying everything from afar.

I know it is a long shot, but I wanted to try through this sub to see if anyone has any insights I could use. All information that you think could come in handy, or might be good to know, please let me know! Thanks everyone.

Posted Mar 1, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

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