ABSTRACT
In her (2009) book on How Terrorism Ends, Cronin outlines the dominant perspective of how the Provisional IRA’s campaign drew to a conclusion: state and non-state repression, combining a policing and intelligence approach with paramilitary assassinations, led both the British government and the Provisional IRA to see the conflict as a stalemate, and electoral success reinforced the potential in an exclusively political route. As the parties engaged in the peace process, they became invested in it and found it increasingly difficult to return fully to an armed strategy. The culmination of this process, the Good Friday Agreement, was ambiguously constructed to be acceptable to both Unionists and Republicans, with Sinn Fein arguing that its constitutional agenda was being advanced. In the background throughout this settlement was a changing international context, with South African intermediaries assisting with the process, thus leading to a sense that history was marching in a certain direction that made the Republican armed struggle obsolete.1
