ABSTRACT
Investigating the crisis in Northern Ireland from the sixties to the early seventies, this chapter illustrates the ways in which state sovereignty and transnationalism clashed. The chapter examines how individuals, groups, and transnational networks attempted to challenge political systems, resist governments, and mobilize for change. It explores how the protests of the 1960s affected Northern Ireland's political system. While the British protest movement is often referred to as merely a cultural phenomenon, the Northern Irish challenge to British sovereignty underscores that the protest was eminently political, encouraging a rethinking of traditional understandings of the decade. The transnational activism had started in 1967 had a lasting effect on political power in Northern Ireland since it irreversibly changed the power relation between Belfast and London authorities. The legal frame of the "artificially-formed Northern state" or "British controlled statelet" has long been one of the main causes of conflict because it constituted political inequality.
