Turbulent Times: Bloody Sunday and the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

On 30 January 1972 in Derry Northern Ireland 13 men were shot dead by British soldiers. Bloody Sunday has come to be seen to be one of the key events in the recent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This article is an analysis of that event and its context through a range of theoretical ideas that seek to address the processes at work through the notion of movement or flow. Mobilizing a range of concepts from theorists such as Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari, Delanda, Serres and Virilio, the period is understood as one characterised by disruptive turbulence in the social field. As part of this reading use is made of a number of formulations from Complexity theory to address the open and dynamic nature of the forces involved. By considering the civil rights movement and the emergence of Free Derry as moments in an ongoing attempt to de‐code and de‐territorialize the founding terms of the Unionist statelet, the article argues that the potential for radical social change was drastically halted by Bloody Sunday.