The articles in this special issue explicitly engage with and challenge conventional academic analyses in order to confront the ways in which the conflict on Northern Ireland has traditionally been represented and understood.

Dr Marysia Zalewski is Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.,
Dr John Barry is Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University Belfast.

Chapter 1 Intervening in Northern Ireland: Critically re-thinking representations of the conflict, Marysia Zalewski; Chapter 2 The Local, the Global and the Troubling, Jenny Edkins; Chapter 3 Towards a Problematisation of the Problematisations that Reduce Northern Ireland to a 'Problem', Nick Vaughan-Williams; Chapter 4 Heidegger and the Aporia: Translation and Cultural Authenticity, Fiona Sampson; Chapter 5 'What's the Problem?': Political Theory, Rhetoric and Problem-Setting, Alan Finlayson; Chapter 6 Public Institutions, Overlapping Consensus and Trust, Ciarán O'Kelly; Chapter 7 The Virgin Mary Connection: Reflecting on Feminism and Northern Irish Politics, Fidelma Ashe; Chapter 8 Queering Community: Reimagining the Public Sphere in Northern Ireland, Kathryn Conrad; Chapter 9 The Politics of Community, Dominic Bryan; Chapter 10 Genealogies of Partition; History, History-Writing and 'the Troubles' in Ireland, Margaret O'Callaghan;