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This volume focuses on a number of research questions, drawn from social movement scholarship: How does nonviolent mobilisation emerge and persist in deeply divided societies? What are the trajectories of participation in violent groups in these societies? What is the relationship between overt mobilisation, clandestine operations and protests among political prisoners? What is the role of media coverage and identity politics? Can there be non-sectarian collective mobilisation in deeply divided societies? The answers to these questions do not merely try to explain contentious politics in Northern Ireland; instead, they inform future research on social movements beyond this case. Specifically, we argue that an actor-based approach and the contextualisation of contentious politics provide a dynamic theoretical framework to better understand the Troubles and the development of conflicts in deeply divided societies.
List of contents
1. Contextualizing the Troubles: Investigating Deeply Divided Societies through Social Movements Research, 2. What did the Civil Rights Movement Want? Changing Goals and Underlying Continuities in the Transition from Protest to Violence, 3. Vacillators or Resisters? The Unionist Government Responses to the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, 4. White Negroes and the Pink IRA: External Mainstream Media Coverage and Civil Rights Contention in Northern Ireland, 5. 'We are the people': Protestant Identity and Collective Action in Northern Ireland, 1968-1985, 6. Ulster Loyalist Accounts of Armed Mobilization, Demobilization, and Decommissioning, 7. Social Movements and Social Movement Organizations: Recruitment, Ideology, and Splits, 8. Movement Inside and Outside of Prison: The H-Block Protest, 9. 'Mother Ireland, Get Off Our Backs': Republican Feminist Resistance in the North of Ireland, 10. 'One Community, Many Faces': Non-Sectarian Social Movements and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, 11. The Peace People: Principled and Revolutionary Nonviolence in Northern Ireland, Afterword: Social Movements, Long-Term Processes, and Ethnic Division in Northern Ireland
About the author
Lorenzo Bosi is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at the European University Institute. His research interests include social movements and political violence. He has published in several academic journals and is co-editor of
Dynamics of Political Violence (Ashgate, 2014), of
Political Violence in Context (ECPR PRESS, Forthcoming), of
The Dynamics of Radicalization: A Relational Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming) and of
The Consequences of Social Movements (Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming).
Gianluca De Fazio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at James Madison University. His most recent research on the conflict in Northern Ireland and racial violence has been published in
Mobilization, Sociological Methodology and
International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
