Gazed and subdued? Spectacle, spatial order and identity in the contested city

From 2012–2013, Northern Ireland was rocked by loyalist protests over limits placed on flying the British flag at Belfast City Hall. The sometimes-violent manifestations were roundly condemned by officials and business leaders as an assault on ‘Brand Northern Ireland’, a threat to the province’s reputation as a successful model of post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction. Accordingly, this article revises and updates Goffman’s concept of ‘a veneer of consensus’ to show how new regimes of political repression are inaugurated in the name of ‘tourism’. With the tourist gaze invoked by local officials as both neutral arbiter and economic imperative, the protests are subsequently assessed as a form of power negotiation, whereby symbolic contestation over the right to define the image of place in both physical and virtual spaces assumed an intensely political role.