2,994 research outputs found
Incorporation and Democratization. The long-term process of institutionalisation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement
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The contemporary Irish republican movement : between past and future
No full textThe Peace Process opened a new season in the history of Northern Ireland. Yet acts of violence continue, and the leadership of the main parties involved is in deep crisis. After offering an historical overview of the main events, the Author engages in a roundtable three eminent exponents and commentators of the political life of Northern Ireland. They reflect on the changes undertaken by the contemporary republican movement before and during the Irish Peace Process. How has its leadership been able to communicate a vision of politics and society freed from those elements of radical antagonism which permeated a wide sector of the nationalistic community? This evolution produced relevant changes also inside the Unionist community. The roundtable introduces poignant criticism toward the republican movement, echoing the contemporary political and historiographic debate, which never appeared in Italian publications. The roundtable also approaches the question of the justifications used to explain the armed struggle as an instrument of political activity in highly polarised contexts, and the processes which suspended those methods
Explaining the Emergence Process of the Civil Rights Protest in Northern Ireland (1945-1968): Insights from a relational social movement approach
No full textThis article explains how the contingent of complex interactions among pre-existing structural settings, institutional constraints, processes of regional and international transformative events, and uniquely combined developments within and between different contenders in the aftermath of the Second World War shaped Northern Ireland socio and political relations and thus instigated the Civil Rights Movement mobilization process. By re-introducing the time-space context into our studies of collective action, through a relational reading, my intent first is to advance our understanding of those episodes and complex patterns of interaction that give rise to social movements, and second to move beyond the static movement-centric approach explanation and away from the a-historical nature of much of the social movement literature. My historical-sociological research, into the longitudinal case study of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement mobilization, involves secondary and new empirical primary sources, such as archival analysis, qualitative examination of Northern Ireland daily newspapers during the 1960s, and the collection of 35 semi-structured interviews with key players from the Civil Rights Movement
The consequences of social movements: taking stock and looking forward
No full textCitizens of both democratic and authoritarian countries seem to become less supportive of those in power and more willing to use non-conventional forms of collective action for putting pressure on authorities. This was the case, for example, during the past few years, with the major upsurges of protest, in Eastern Europe (Coloured Revolutions), in the Middle East (Arab Spring), in Southern Europe (the Indignados in Spain, the Agonaktismenoi in Greece), in the United States (Occupy Wall Street), in Chile (the Pinquinos), as well as anti-government protests in Hong Kong, Thailand, and South Africa. Such waves of mobilization, comparable in their size to those of the 1960s and 1970s, bring to the fore some important questions for social movement research and call for a deeper understanding of social and political change: When and how does mobilization make a difference? When and how do activists achieve their goals? Is protest a necessary and/or sufficient condition for producing social and political change? Do social movements have any long-term legacies on our societies? Do they change the life choices of those participating in protest activities? How does all this vary both across contexts and across different movements?
These and related questions are not new, but until the 1970s scholars paid little attention to the consequences of social movements as protest was mainly regarded as an irrational action with no instrumental goals (Buechler 2004). Since then, also thanks to some pioneering works (Gamson 1990; Piven and Cloward 1979; Schumaker 1975), a new research field emerged slowly and allowed one of the present authors to note as late as in 1998 that “we still lack systematic empirical analyses that would add to our knowledge of the conditions under which movements produce certain effects” (Giugni 1998: 373). The field was revamped, amongst other things, also thanks to two edited collections entirely devoted to the study of different kinds of the effects of social movements (Giugni et al. 1998, 1999). This sudden focus on social movement outcomes could be related not only to the wave of democratization in the Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1990s, but also to the fact that sufficient time had passed from the mobilization of the 1968 generation in Western Europe and civil rights mobilization in the United States
A Processual Approach to Political Violence. How History Matters
No full textThe long-term tendency in the scholarly literature has been to approach political violence as an outcome, as a discrete event in its own right, coming out of nowhere and relatively disconnected from history. Scholars have generally preferred to search for the most powerful predictor for a large number of cases, in an attempt to explain why collective actors adopt violent forms of action at a specific moment in time. They have thus shown an interest in the synchronic or ‘snapshot’ view of the studied phenomena, in search of a ‘magic formula’ for stopping political violence, rather than a means of explaining it. This chapter, rather than focusing on causal factors, explains political violence as a process, where the actions of differently situated actors are embedded in complex webs of sociopolitical relations, which are formed and transformed, in a constant state of flux. A processual approach allows us to counter the ahistoricity and lack of context that characterises much of the work on political violence, instead moving towards a dynamic, gradual and procedural perspective on how and when political violence develops. The processual approach adopted in this chapter aims to reconstruct the historical understanding of how and when the Brigate Rosse decided to adopt political violence as a form of action, leading to its first premeditated political assassination
Social Movements and Interrelated Effects: The Process of Social Change in the Post-Movement Lives of Provisional IRA Volunteers
No full textEste artículo sistematiza una perspectiva de investigación que evalúa cómo los diferentes tipos de resultados de los movimientos sociales se influyen mutuamente en el tiempo. Esto debería ofrecer una perspectiva diferente sobre las consecuencias de los movimientos sociales, cambiando el foco de atención desde los resultados individuales a procesos de cambio social generados a partir de la interacción entre diferentes tipos de efectos. La variedad de formas en las que los resultados de los movimientos se influyen potencialmente entre sí en el corto plazo, o durante un período prolongado de tiempo, se dividen en seis procesos hipotéticos. Empíricamente, a través de un enfoque centrado en los procesos, este artículo investiga cómo las respuestas políticas ofrecidas del Estado británico a la movilización disruptiva de la comunidad católica de Irlanda del Norte y la lucha armada del PIRA han dado forma a la vida post-movimiento de los voluntarios del PIRA.This article systematizes a research perspective that assesses how different types of social movement outcomes mutually influence one another over time. This should offer a different perspective on the consequences of social movements by shifting the focus from single outcomes to processes of social change that are generated by the interaction between different types of effects. The variety of ways in which movement outcomes potentially influence each other in the short-term, or over an extended period of time, will be broken down into six hypothetical processes. Empirically, through a process-tracing approach, in this article I investigate how the British state’s responses at policy level toward the disruptive mobilization of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland and to the armed campaign of the PIRA have shaped the post-movement lives of PIRA volunteers
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