From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle: Republican Tradition and Transformation in Northern Ireland

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Description

This is the first book to comprehensively examine the shifts that have informed republican tradition and transformation from the beginning of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland until the final stages of the peace process. Using a combination of empirical research and literature, the book addresses Northern Irish republican identity through the influences of imagination, history and Catholicism before it charts the processes of decision-making and management that shaped the transition from militarism to politics. Drawing from interview material from a wide range of actors and key players the book considers the challenges that political republicanism has worked to overcome and concludes that ongoing political development will require a less acute, more ambiguous communication of values based on pragmatism and compromise, rather than the continued articulation of principles and convictions that sustained the armed struggle. A unique work, From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle is essential for students and researchers in Irish politics, conflict resolution, and security studies

Reviews

Spencer has made a significant contribution to the existing literature on Provisional Republicanism. From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle will be of interest to anyone working on the Troubles and the peace process. * Twentieth Century British History *
Graham Spencers From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle: Republican Tradition and Transformation in Northern Ireland is a much needed and important addition to historical studies of the Troubles and the peace process ... The book usefully draws together extensive literature on the PIRA and the 1981 hunger strike, making a valuable contribution to the field with extensive, high-profile interviews and the exploration of a republican social imaginary. * Irish Studies Review *
An accomplished account of conflicts and dialogues within and between nationalist political parties (Sinn Fein and the SDLP) and the Provisional IRA from the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century. * History *
In this penetrating study, Graham Spencer shines a powerful light into the inner recesses of the Republican mind-set in the Northern Ireland peace process in describing how a small but resolute leadership cadre, with cunning and pertinacity, with verbal dexterity and great personal courage, over a period of years, managed to persuade a mainly clandestine organisation wedded to violence as a medium of political discourse to decommission the Armalite and embrace the ballot-box as the only means to effect change in a modern democratic society. In the process they altered the Republican psyche, formed in a matrix of Irish history, an overweening victimhood, moral ambiguity and Roman Catholic precepts and practices. More widely in the field of conflict management and resolution, there are lessons in the importance of language, and of the need for leaders constantly to redefine terms and to spend as much time negotiating them with their own supporters as with the opposition. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of what went on in key parts of the Northern Ireland Peace process, and more widely as a handbook for analysts and those who would intervene in other seemingly intractable conflicts. * Maurice Hayes, former Northern Ireland Ombudsman and Boundary Commissioner, Northern Ireland. *
Graham Spencer provides us with an insightful analysis of what shapes republican thinking and the changes it has undergone since the peace process started. A valuable and essential contribution. * Jonathan Powell, Downing Street Chief of Staff under Tony Blair 1997-2007, Chief British negotiator on the Northern Ireland peace process and founder of conflict resolution organisation Inter Mediate *
This book contains some remarkably illuminating insights into the evolving republican mind-set from significant participants in the Peace Process. Getting these voices to speak so frankly says much about the authors unusual ability to build trust. He has weaved their contributions into a fascinating and important addition to the narrative of the Troubles. * Sir Jonathan Phillips, Warden, Keble College, Oxford and Permanent Secretary of the Northern Ireland Office 2005-2010 *

Author Bio

Graham Spencer is Reader in Politics, Conflict and the Media at the University of Portsmouth, UK and Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention, NUI, Maynooth, Ireland.