Double Conflict, Humanitarianism and Security Research Seminar

Contextualizing the biographical outcomes of former Provisional IRA activists: a structure-agency dynamic

Dr Lorenzo Bosi (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Moore Institute Visiting Fellow)

This lecture investigates the biographical outcomes of Provisional IRA volunteers. It draws upon 25 semi-structured interviews with former rank-and-file members of the armed group. Empirically, a first important result of this lecture is that among the former PIRA volunteers interviewed there was no linearity between the different motives for micro-mobilization and their biographical outcomes. The respondents did not vary so much in their present-day attitudes and actions; instead they continued to espouse Republican attitudes and remained active socially and politically. The second empirical argument of this chapter is that British counter-terrorist policies and reintegration programs have produced the external factors and forces that shaped the post-armed struggle lives of Provisional IRA activists. These on their hands did not followed such reintegration programs in the way they were designed to function and brought in their “new-mobilization” their own agency and previous skills learned while in the armed group and in prison. All this resulted in the long term in the institutionalization of not only the republican movement, but also of its armed militants. In making further ground on a topic which has received limited attention in the literature on political violence, this lecture aims to see how the study of biographical consequences of individual participation in armed groups can inform and challenge the existing movement-centric social movement literature on biographical outcomes. It builds on the contextualization of individual trajectories, with the result of fully recognizing the structure-agency dynamic shaping participants’ post-movement lives.

Randall Collins’s Forward Panic Pathway to Violence and the 1972 Bloody Sunday Killings in Northern Ireland

Dr Martin McCleery (Queen’s University Belfast)

During the course of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland the British Army shot dead thirteen  innocent civilians on Bloody Sunday on 30  January 1972. This paper will offer an alternative explanation of the Parachute Regiment’s use of excessive force and will argue whatever the motivations for the shootings there was no intention to shoot innocent civilians either by the authorities, and the officers commanding the soldiers or indeed the soldiers themselves. This will be the central topic of the paper which uses Randall Collins’s Micro-Sociological Theory of Violence to explain these events. This article will also advance Collins’s theory by examining it within a particular local political context and in doing so also provide a new explanation of the violence that took place on Bloody Sunday.

Part of the 2015 Conflict, Humanitarianism and Security Research Seminar series organized by the Conflict, Humanitarianism and Security Research Cluster.