Though it has a population smaller than Chicago, the small region of Northern Ireland can offer a good lesson for the United States according to Professor Colleen Murphy. In an opinion written for the News-Gazette, Murphy relates her experience visiting Northern Ireland near the end of "The Troubles," three decades of political polarization and violent conflict that raged into the 1990s, and how the heated rhetoric among US politics resembles those that roiled the British region. "We need collectively to seek a better path forward before polarized citizens and polarized politicians refusing to engage or negotiate with each other results in a breakdown of the very possibility for democratic politics," she writes.

Read her full op-ed on the News-Gazette website.