Gianluca De Fazio
"Political Radicalization in the Making: The Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, 1968-1974"
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Abstract
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When in 1968 the civil rights movement (CRM) started to mobilize the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland to protest against discrimination, few observers could have anticipated its outcomes.
After having met hostile resistance by the Protestant unionist majority and brutal repression by police forces, the reformist CRM turned to increasingly contentious and violent tactics of protest, some of their activists eventually enrolling in terrorist organizations such as the IRA. The aspirations of the movement changed too, as it ultimately demanded the abolition of the Northern Ireland state, rather than its reform. In a few years, what had started as a peaceful mobilization for civil rights led to the outbreak of the “Troubles”. The aim of this project is to explain the radicalization of the CRM in Northern Ireland by looking at protesters’ experience of repression and exposure to radical ideologies, as well as civil rights organizations’ dynamics of interactions with state authorities and antagonistic counter-movements.
The Northern Ireland Political Collection at the Linenhall Library in Belfast holds over a quarter of a million items - from pamphlets to newspapers, to transcripts of political meetings - which document the activities and views of all parties to the conflict, from government to paramilitaries. I intend to sift through these texts and systematically examine each actor’s activities and claims over time, and, thus, show the nature and timing of the radicalizing trajectory of the CRM, as it learned to cope with repression and hostile unionist counter-mobilization.
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