Community Resilience in Northern Ireland: A Framework for Transformation

The Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime (EPPOC) has developed a Community Resilience Framework to support communities most affected by deprivation, coercive control, and criminal exploitation. This article explores how EPPOC’s framework enables transformative change, offers insights into resilience in post-conflict societies, and highlights lessons for wider security and peacebuilding efforts.

Understanding the Context: Paramilitarism as Multi-Layered Harms

Paramilitarism costs NI in the region of £750 million annually and affects up to 40% of the population. While some paramilitary groups engage in community activity, others are involved in criminality, organised crime, and terrorism. Most are no longer cohesive or militaristic in structure.

As a small, post-conflict, and devolved nation, NI faces unique complexities. Its transition from violent ethnic conflict has been globally recognised but has been neither smooth nor easy. The mere presence of armed non-state actors represents a persistent threat in areas most affected.

Figure One outlines the range of harms caused by paramilitaries, from visible and well documented to less obvious but equally damaging. EPPOC aims to address all of these, blending international evidence-based practice with innovative local approaches.

EPPOC research also highlights the profound impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) across NI . Sixty percent of adults reported at least one ACE, and nearly 20% experienced four or more. These levels are strongly associated with poor mental and physical health, educational disruption, and increased vulnerability to harm in adulthood. Almost a third of respondents (some born after the Good Friday Agreement) experienced conflict-specific adversities, including paramilitary threats and collective violence. These were most prevalent in deprived communities, compounding existing inequalities and reinforcing cycles of trauma.

Figure 1: Typology of Paramilitary Harm

EPPOC

Established in 2016, EPPOC delivers interventions across Government Departments, law enforcement agencies, local councils, and community and voluntary sector partners to tackle paramilitarism and its wider harms.

It operates across NI, with projects varying in scale, focus, and methodology based on assessed needs. All projects must demonstrate added value and contribute to shared, measurable medium and long-term objectives.

EPPOC uses a public health model to understand root causes, identify effective interventions, and scale them for maximum benefit. This involves a cross-sector, phased approach to intervention (see Figure 2), functioning like a relay team to drive lasting change.

Figure 2: Public health Approach - stages of intervention

Defining Resilience in a Post-Conflict Setting

The need to address the root causes of paramilitarism in NI is well-documented. EPPOC’s approach combines immediate threat reduction, early intervention, and long-term structural change, targeting inequalities and intergenerational trauma. Equally important is recognising the strengths within communities that are so powerful in driving change.

The Community Resilience Framework considers three capacities:

• Absorptive resilience - the ability to withstand shocks and “keep going”
• Adaptive resilience - is capacity to adjust, cope, or “work around” challenges
• Transformative resilience - the capacity to reshape systems when ecological, economic, or social structures are no longer tenable

While absorptive and adaptive resilience help communities survive, transformative resilience enables them to thrive.

How Can Community Resilience Support Transformational Change?

EPPOC defines community resilience across seven measurable domains:

1. Strengthening relationships and engagement to drive collective action 
2. Improving access to existing support services 
3. Building local skills and knowledge 
4. Enhancing infrastructure 
5. Amplifying marginalised community voices
6. Fostering hope and belief in the power to create change
7. Improving PSNI-community relations

A wide range of projects, from youth engagement and restorative practices to community development and support for ex-prisoners, contribute to each domain. Evaluation is led by Queens University Belfast through an ongoing Action Research model and project-level reporting, enabling adaptive learning across EPPOC.

Insights From Delivery: What’s Working

Since 2019, Communities in Transition (CiT) has placed local people at the heart of decision-making, empowering communities to identify challenges and lead solutions. In eight areas, community-led forums shaped action plans on key issues like youth services, housing, and community safety. This trust-based, collaborative approach reflects the idea that change is best achieved through collective action grounded in personal relationships. It has delivered concrete outcomes - from reimaging paramilitary murals to creating community safety forums across NI. 
Thousands have engaged in sustained activity as part of CiT, with tens of thousands attending community events such as health fairs, cultural exhibitions, and social action projects. These figures reflect a growing sense of agency in communities historically marked by distrust and disengagement.

EPPOC has invested heavily in skills development. The Diploma in Community Development Practice equips individuals to lead local initiatives, with many participants going on to volunteer, work, and lead future iterations. By developing the confidence and expertise to challenge coercive control and advocate for their communities, EPPOC is seeding long-term structural change. Similarly, the Developing Women in the Community project has increased women’s leadership from 35.3% to 60.8%, and volunteering from 46.4% to 79.2%, an important shift given the gendered nature of exclusion and inequality.

New community organisations have been established, and existing ones strengthened. Many report increased capacity to address local vulnerabilities and work effectively with agencies.

Through CiT, thousands have accessed support services, including mentoring, tailored plans, and drop-in clinics. Multi-agency collaboration has enabled cross-referral between projects and statutory providers. Community surveys and events have addressed local concerns, ensuring responsive action.

One of the most powerful indicators of transformative change is the restoration of hope.

In theDeveloping Women in the Community project, measures of belonging rose from 67.3% to 77.7%, and a sense of agency in shaping their areas rose significantly. These shifts directly counter the control narratives exploited by paramilitary groups.

EPPOC’s impact is not uniform across all areas. Persistent disparities remain, and addressing structural imbalances will require sustained investment and political will. The foundations laid by EPPOC offers a model for how resilience can be built from the ground up, through participation, capacity-building, and the reweaving of social ties.

What Can This Tell Us About Resilience in Post Conflict Societies?

EPPOC’s work offers valuable insights for building resilience in post-conflict societies:

• Beyond traditional measures: Resilience must move past frameworks focused solely on social capital and services to include psychological and intergenerational effects of trauma
• Inequality and trauma: High levels of ACEs in deprived areas show that resilience cannot be divorced from structural inequality and ongoing harm.
• A dynamic process: Resilience is a dynamic process of recovery, adaptation, and resistance 
• Trauma-informed and place-based: Systems must build protective factors, foster benevolent experiences, and disrupt cycles of adversity
• Visible and invisible harm: Resilience strategies must address both overt violence and subtle, cumulative harms
• Context matters: Absorbative, adaptive, and transformative resilience manifest differently and must be contextually understood
• Strength from within: Community strengths such as solidarity, pride, and creativity are key drivers of change
• Local empowerment: Empowering communities to lead decision-making fosters autonomy, legitimacy, ownership, and sustainable development
• Restoring hope: Transformative resilience requires healing, and rebuilding belief in the possibility of change is vital for lasting peace

Transformative Resilience: EPPOC’s Approach and Lessons for Post-Conflict Societies

Resilience is not about enduring adversity indefinitely; it’s about gaining the strength to overcome it. EPPOC applies a public health approach to violence: treating violence like a disease means not only alleviating symptoms but transforming the conditions that allow harm to recur. This includes building economic and political alternatives, restoring hope and driving systemic change.

Communities that organise to anonymously report crime or steer teenagers away from paramilitary gangs demonstrate resilience that confronts adversity instead of withstanding it. This includes leveraging strength into efforts that break the grip of violence and deprivation, rather than reinforcing the status quo.

EPPOC views resilience as an evolving process shaped by relationships, resources and power. Its work responds to local contexts, builds on strengths, and challenges the conditions that sustain paramilitary influence. It repositions communities from passive recipients of support to active agents of change.

Developing meaningful and lasting community resilience takes time, collaboration, innovation, and courage. EPPOC's framework, grounded in targeted interventions, robust evaluation, and community participation, charts a path toward an inclusive, peaceful, and confident NI. A recent NI Affairs Committee report welcomed the “trauma-informed and public health approach” being taken to address the systemic causes of paramilitarism. This reflects a growing consensus that investing in long-term community capacity is essential for an enduring peace.

NI’s communities continue to shoulder the unacceptable burdens of serious violence, trauma and social division. These harms constrain potential and drive unsustainable demand on services. Other post-conflict regions face similar challenges, including the presence of armed groups, the emergence of organised crime, and lack of confidence in the police and wider justice systems. EPPOC offers lessons worth sharing.

Resilience is not about enduring adversity indefinitely; it’s about gaining the strength to overcome it.

Key Lessons from EPPOC’s Violence Reduction Work

1. Data driven collaboration: Evidence-based approaches must be operationalised to encourage ownership among all partners
2. Shared, staged outcomes: Agreeing long term goals with manageable short-term outcomes can build consensus on sensitive topics
3. Measure what matters: All outcomes should be measurable, and addressing data gaps is essential to track progress
4. Value the unknowns: Understanding what isn’t known is as important as understanding what we do
5. Cross-sector translation: Shared goals help bridge gaps between government, academia, and the community and voluntary sector
6. Delivery matters: What we do is important but so is how 
   we do it. Identifying key enablers and shared behaviours is key
7. Sustainable commitment: Systemic change demands sustainable funding and policy commitment.

There is a clear moral imperative for prioritising this work and also a compelling economic one.

• Home Office data shows public health approaches prevent an estimated 243 violence without injury offences per 100,000 people, with a £4.10 return per £1 invested
• The Cardiff Model for Violence Prevention showed £82 benefit for every £1 spent, including £14.80 for the health service and £19.10 for the justice system
• EPPOC estimates a reduction of 112 paramilitary attacks saving £1.57-£2.23m and 84 fewer incidents of violence with injury in 2022, saving £1.18m. These figures only reflect paramilitary related harm; scaling to wider harms could generate even greater savings.

EPPOC’s work illustrates that resilience is not about accepting the world as it is but reshaping it. By empowering communities, building capacity, and investing in long-term change, NI shows that even after conflict, communities can transform their resilience into a foundation for lasting security and hope.

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Claire Hazelden is a Research Analyst for the NI Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime (EPPOC).

The EPPOC Community Resilience framework is based on work undertaken by Lucy Geddes (CIT Benefits Handbook & Resilience workshop report) from Co-operation Ireland, who utilised a co-design approach to identify indicators of community resilience to Paramilitarism, criminality and organised crime, drawing heavily on Interpeace’s Resilience for Peace framework.