Days of anti-immigration violence in Belfast have shown how three decades of unrest in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, still shape the contours of daily life, residents and academics said. "We still have a legacy of conflict, of sectarian conflict here," Queen's University Belfast professor Joanne Hughes said. She was remembering the violence that tore apart largely Catholic, pro-Irish republicans and Protestant, pro-UK unionists for three decades until the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998. "We still have high levels of community division. We still have segregation, particularly in the most deprived areas," said Hughes, who researches the role of education in divided societies. Read moreBelfast: The legacy of the Troubles After a graphic video of a Belfast man being brutally stabbed, allegedly by a Sudanese man, circulated at the start of this week, riots broke out in primarily unionist, working-class neighbourhoods late Tuesday. The violence largely unfolded in "interface areas", where Protestants are still divided from Catholic neighbourhoods by fences and signage. Agitators, many masked young men, torched cars and houses, targeting some minority ethnic houses and forcing families to flee their homes. In the aftermath, some locals and pro-Irish politicians pointed fingers at loyalist paramilitaries which still exert influence, especially over boys and young men, in predominantly Protestant areas. Loyalist paramilitaries There was still "influence here from paramilitary organisations on the union side", said Sean Og O Murchu, a Belfast-based author and republican activist. "They're sort of the hangover from the Troubles." The Belfast Telegraph was told by a loyalist source that while they were not "orchestrating or encouraging" the violence, they were deliberately "standing back and refusing to get involved to stop it". For many, poor access to housing, healthcare and education has been blamed on immigrants, experts said. Government figures published last month showed that the number of people aged 16 to 24 out of work, not in education or training in Northern Ireland had risen to 11.6 percent, up 1.9 percent from the previous quarter. "I suspect that most of those who are involved in these riots and violent protests are from communities where they feel disenfranchised, where they feel a lack of hope about the future," said Hughes. "The perception is that these migrants are taking their houses" but this "isn't true", said Dominic Bryan, a political anthropology professor at Queen's University, creating a new layer of division in the already segregated society.