Leading to Peace: Prisoner Resistance and Leadership Development in the IRA and Sinn Fein
Leading to Peace: Prisoner Resistance and Leadership Development in the IRA and Sinn Fein By Claire Delisle Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Ph.D. degree in Criminology Department of Criminology Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa ©Claire Delisle, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 To the women in my family Dorothy, Rollande, Émilie, Phoebe and Avril Abstract The Irish peace process is heralded as a success among insurgencies that attempt transitions toward peaceful resolution of conflict. After thirty years of armed struggle, pitting Irish republicans against their loyalist counterparts and the British State, the North of Ireland has a reconfigured political landscape with a consociational governing body where power is shared among several parties that hold divergent political objectives. The Irish Republican Movement, whose main components are the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a covert guerilla armed organization, and Sinn Fein, the political party of Irish republicans, initiated peace that led to all-inclusive talks in the 1990s and that culminated in the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, setting out the parameters for a non-violent way forward. Given the traditional intransigence of the IRA to consider any route other than armed conflict, how did the leadership of the Irish Republican Movement secure the support of a majority of republicans for a peace initiative that has held now for more than fifteen years? This dissertation explores the dynamics of leadership in this group, and in particular, focuses on the prisoner resistance waged by its incarcerated activists and volunteers.
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