ABSTRACT
The sheer scale and duration of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, with 3530 people killed (1840 civilians) and 47,500 injured, between 1969 and 1998, make this conflict as one of the most lethal episodes of contention in postwar Western Europe. This volume relies on social movement research to challenge the exceptional character that has been often attributed to this conflict in the past. At the same time, it asks how research on the Troubles might inform future research on social movements beyond the Northern Ireland case. Despite the increasing importance of ethnonationalist conflicts in the post-Cold War period (Wimmer 2013; Muro 2015), social movement scholars have paid little attention to deeply divided societies (notable exceptions include: Cirulli and Conversi 2010; Cowell-Meyers 2014; Demirel-Pegg, forthcoming; Gorenburg 2003; Khawaja 1995; Martheu 2009; Melucci and Diani 1992; Norwich 2015; Olzak and Olivier 1998; Seidman 2000, 2011; Touquet 2015; Vladisavljevic 2002; Watts 2006), preferring instead to focus on ‘stable’, Western democracies (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). This book aims to at least partially address this gap by presenting state-of-the-art social movement research on the Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
