This volume examines the critical factors and processes by which the Provisional Irish Republican movement campaign from 1969 to 1998 transformed a once acquiescent nationalist population in Northern Ireland into a counterpublic of resistance demanding national self-determination and social justice. Considering the establishment of Irish Republican community institutions, prison protests, Republican Feminism, and Provisional IRA media and communications, this volume explores the emergence of Republicanism as a mass social movement in the nationalist Catholic ghettos and rural regions of Northern Ireland in the 1970s - a development that helped to sustain the armed struggle of the Provisional Irish Republican Army for three decades. An examination of the emergence and transformative power of the counterpublic discourse and action of the Irish Republican movement, this volume provides a framework for conceptualizing counterpublics in social movement studies. As such it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, and politics with interests in social movements and mobilization.

About the Author

Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland in Galway, and an Adjunct Professor in International Relations at Webster University, Vienna. He is the author of Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners shaped the Peace Process in Ireland (2022) and Performing Memory: Corporeality, Visuality, and Mobility after 1968, co-edited with Luisa Passerini (2023).

Anne Kane retired as Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Houston Downtown, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Her book, Constructing Irish Nationalist Identity: Ritual and Discourse during the Land War, 1879-1882, was published in 2011.

Reviews

"Scholars still know relatively little about the communities of support that stand behind the more visible face of movement activism. In this fascinating volume, the authors show that Northern Irish Republicans' thirty-year struggle for independence was sustained by a 'counterpublic' forged in tenants associations, prison protests, local broadsheets, street art, and mothers' support committees. Deeply researched and elegantly argued, the volume provides a genuinely new perspective on the ideas and institutions that fuel movements." -Francesca Polletta, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine

"Organizing its detailed, highly innovative empirical investigations around concepts of counterpublic and civil sphere, this volume makes a critical theoretical intervention. Its publication is a major event, not only for studies of Irish Republican resistance but for social movement studies more broadly." -Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Book Information
ISBN 9781032208411
Author Dieter Reinisch
Format Paperback
Page Count 158
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 322g