Armed activism as the enactment of a collective identity: the case of the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972

Abstract

This paper argues that micro-mobilization into armed activism is strongly motivated by the enactment of an identity that people already have prior to their mobilization as a way to strongly assert and emphasize individual agency in the face of major changes in the political context. Empirically, it advocates that those who joined the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972 did so in order to respond to a need for action by a northern nationalist community that stemmed from a perceived, alleged or actual, sense of second-class citizenship. We suggest that the importance of identity rather than ideology can also help us to explain why IRA members and former members overwhelmingly accepted the compromise peace settlement of the 1990s despite the fact that core ideological goals had not been realized. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research outside the Irish context.

Keywords:

• Political violence
• collective identity
• Northern Ireland
• agency
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the interviewees for their willingness to participate in our research. Also we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. None of the above is in any way of course responsible for the opinions we have expressed.

Notes

1. After several unsuccessful military campaigns (1938–1940, 1956–1962 and sporadic attempts in between) the Irish Republican Army (IRA) came onto the scene again in 1969. This time, it was in the aftermath of the struggle for civil rights which unleashed the escalation of a communal conflict and the consequent deployment of the British army. A group of senior IRA members who were dissatisfied with the leadership’s limited response to violence in the North established a ‘Provisional’ IRA Army Council. They began to build the Provisional IRA as an alternative to the original organization which then became known as the ‘Official’ IRA (Ó Dochartaigh, 2008). By the mid-1970s the Official IRA was no longer a significant actor and the Provisional IRA was usually referred to simply as the IRA in the Irish media and in public discourse in Ireland. We follow this usage.

2. Differently from Roy, our approach interprets political violence within the socio-political context (Bosi, Ó Dochartaigh, & Pisoiu, 2015). We argue that when individuals are confronted with major changes in socio-political context they might resort to political violence in order to reassert their agency.

3. We have excluded five interviewees who were already in the republican movement before 1969 from this sample of 30 respondents. This was a distinctive cohort of militants who followed an ideological path of mobilization within the IRA once the split came in 1969/1970. While it is important to mention this cohort of militants, because they provided ‘linearity’ for the armed groups, it is important to stress that they formed only a tiny minority of those northern nationalists active in the IRA after 1969.

4. Irish Times, 22 May 2014, ‘PSNI to seek entire Boston College tape archive’. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/psni-to-seek-entire-boston-college-tape-archive-1.1805726