This is a bold and timely analysis of the conflict in Northern Ireland, offering a comprehensive, up-to-date and constructively critical evaluation of the massive outpouring of literature on the subject. John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary examine the most common explanations of the conflict - nationalist, unionist, Marxist, religious, cultural and economic - highlighting their shortcomings and placing Northern Ireland within a comparative context. Synthesizing their conclusions, the authors advance a realistic but imaginative prognosis for conflict-resolution in this most troubled region.

The historian A. T. Q. Stewart once remarked that in Ireland all history is applied history—that is, the study of the past prosecutes political conflict by other means. Indeed, nearly twenty years after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, "dealing with the past" remains near the top of the political agenda in Northern Ireland. The essays in this volume, by leading experts in the fields of Irish and British history, politics, and international studies, explore the ways in which competing "social" or "collective memories" of the Northern Ireland "Troubles" continue to shape the post-conflict political landscape. The contributors to this volume embrace a diversity of perspectives: the Provisional Republican version of events, as well as that of its Official Republican rival; Loyalist understandings of the recent past as well as the British Army's authorized for-the-record account; the importance of commemoration and memorialization to Irish Republican culture; and the individual memory of one of the noncombatants swept up in the conflict. Tightly specific, sharply focused, and rich in local detail, these essays make a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature of history and memory. The book will interest students and scholars of Irish studies, contemporary British history, memory studies, conflict resolution, and political science. Contributors: Jim Smyth, Ian McBride, Ruan O’Donnell, Aaron Edwards, James W. McAuley, Margaret O’Callaghan, John Mulqueen, and Cathal Goan.

Written during the Northern Ireland peace process and just before the Good Friday Agreement, The Politics of Antagonism sets out to answer questions such as why successive British Governments failed to reach a power-sharing settlement in Northern Ireland and what progress has been made with the Anglo-Irish Agreement. O'Leary and McGarry assess these topics in the light of past historical and social-science scholarship, in interviews of key politicians, and in an examination of political violence since 1969. The result is a book which points to feasible strategies for a democratic settlement in the Northern Ireland question and which allows today's scholars and students to analyse approaches to Northern Ireland from the perspective of the recent past.

This volume seeks to move beyond structure and agency perspectives by suggesting that social movement theories are best suited to foster a perspective that entails 1) an actor-based approach to the Troubles; and 2) the contextualization of contentious politics, or how the contingent and ever-evolving political contexts/opportunities/threats shaped the trajectory of the Troubles. Recent social movement scholarship has proved to be particularly useful in situating the emergence, continuation, and demise of political violence within a larger context of multiple conflicts, in which radical contention is only one possible outcome. Social movement theories also avoid the essentialization of political groups as 'radical' or 'violent'; instead, they place all political actors participating to contention, from paramilitaries to state authorities, within their complex organizational fields, emphasizing their shifting strategies as they interact with each other and adapt to the political context.

The Troubles may have developed into a sectarian conflict, but the violence was sparked by a small band of leftists who wanted Derry in October 1968 to be a repeat of Paris in May 1968. Like their French comrades, Northern Ireland's 'sixty-eighters' had assumed that street fighting would lead to political struggle. The struggle that followed, however, was between communities rather than classes. In the divided society of Northern Ireland, the interaction of the global and the local that was the hallmark of 1968 had tragic consequences. Drawing on a wealth of new sources and scholarship, Simon Prince's timely new edition offers a fresh and compelling interpretation of the civil rights movement of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles. The authoritative and enthralling narrative weaves together accounts of high politics and grassroots protests, mass movements and individuals, and international trends and historic divisions, to show how events in Northern Ireland and around the world were interlinked during 1968.

Volume 3. After the ratification of the Good Friday Agreement in two referendums, for the first time in history political institutions throughout the island of Ireland rested upon the freely given assent of majorities of all the peoples on the island.0It marked, it was hoped, the full political decolonization of Ireland. Whether Ireland would reunify, or whether Northern Ireland remain in union with Great Britain now rested on the will of the people of Ireland, North and South respectively. This volume explains the making of this settlement, and the many failed initiatives that preceded it under British direct rule. Long-term structural and institutional changes and short-term political maneuvers are given their due in this lively but comprehensive assessment. The Anglo-Irish Agreement is identified as the political tipping point, itself partially the outcome of the hunger strikes of 1980-81 that had prevented the criminalization of republicanism. Until 2016 the prudent judgment seemed to be that the Good Friday Agreement had broadly worked, eventually enabling Sinn Fein and the DUP to share power, with intermittent attention from the sovereign governments. Cultural Catholics appeared content if not in love with the Union with Great Britain. But the decision to hold a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union has collaterally damaged and destabilized the Good Friday Agreement. That, in turn, has shaped the UK's tortured exit negotiations with the European Union.

Rethinking Northern Ireland provides a coherent and critical account of the Northern Ireland conflict. Most writing on Northern Ireland is informed by British propaganda, unionist ideology or currently popular 'ethnic conflict' paradigm which allows analysts to wallow in a fascination with tribal loyalty. Rethinking Northern Ireland sets the record straight by reembedding the conflict in Ireland in the history of an literature on imperialism and colonialism. Written by Irish, Scottish and English women and men it includes material on neglected topics such as the role of Britain, gender, culture and sectarianism. It presents a formidable challenge to the shibboleths of contemporary debate on Northern Ireland. A just and lasting peace necessitates thorough re-evaluation and Rethinking Northern Ireland provides a stimulus to that urgent task.