The intellectual internment of a conflict: the forgotten war in Northern Ireland
M. L. R. SMITH*
War is a great affair of state, the realms of life and death, the road to ruin, a thing to be studied with extreme diligence. Sun Tzu
Glancing backwards over Northern Ireland’s turbulent past is not perhaps the most virtuous of occupations given the political advances since the Good Friday Agreement of April . Judged from any standpoint, progress has been considerable. In May the fledgling settlement was endorsed overwhelm- ingly by the electorates of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Shortly afterwards, in June, elections to a new Ulster assembly were held to establish a power-sharing executive to govern the province. Such developments, unthink- able a few years ago, hold out the prospect that Northern Ireland can make the transition from its bloody past to an internal accommodation where the use of violence to pursue political goals is erased for good. Movement forward continues. Even periodic eruptions of violence have not impeded momentum but have, instead, spurred the determination to press ahead. In the wake of the bombing in Omagh by the republican splinter group, the Real IRA, in August which killed people, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared: ‘The aim of the bombers was not just to kill innocent people but was to strike at the heart of the peace process. The best response we can give is not therefore to abandon the Good Friday Agreement but to carry it forward vigorously, to deny them the very objective they seek, and to continue to work for a better future for Northern Ireland that puts the past behind us.’
* Generous thanks are extended to Paul Dixon, Karin von Hippel, Khong Yuen Foong, Lynda Koh and Matthew Uttley for the provision of bibliographical information. While I am responsible for the views stated here, I have benefited considerably from the insights derived from conversations with Robert Bell, Theo Farrell, Conor Gearty, Bruce Hoffman, Nicholas Khoo, Nick Lewin and the Algerian specialist, Claire Spencer, who reminded me that Northern Ireland is not the only conflict which has been under studied and misunderstood. Prime Minister, Statement to the House of Commons, September .
International Affairs , () –
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The Prime Minister’s stated intention to banish the past and concentrate on the future was given expression in renewed efforts to work towards the full implementation of the agreement. Further progress was seen after the Omagh bombing with the IRA’s political brethren, Sinn Fein, trying to inch towards an accommodation over the vexed issue of the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. This was soon followed by the first face-to-face meeting between David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s Unionist First Minister, and Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein. A few days later, in mid-September, the inaugural session of the new Northern Ireland Assembly took place. For the first time sworn enemies sat in the same chamber, ‘embarking’, in Trimble’s words, ‘on one of the most novel and challenging journeys in the annals of democratic arrange- ments’. Events like those at Omagh have tempered some of the unfettered optimism with the realization that the road ahead is strewn with potentially serious problems that need to be negotiated with care. This realization has kept analytical attention focused on the present to ensure that these problems can be surmounted and forward momentum sustained. All these developments are, of course, positive and welcome. But before we all charge off into the distance, I would like to issue a mild, though I hope not too timid appeal to hold on a minute. I want to suggest we pause for a moment to consider how we, the people who analyse events in Northern Ireland, have got to where we are. By this I do not mean simply raking over grim events of the past or dissecting the mechanics of the peace process, but taking a step back to think about how Northern Ireland has been treated in scholarly discourse. In particular, I would like to take issue with one of the most pervasive ideas about the Northern Ireland conflict, namely that it has been rigorously studied; on the contrary, I would contend that for the past three decades Northern Ireland has been one of the most under-studied conflicts in the world. That may sound absurd. It is indeed absurd that this small but brutal war in a corner of western Europe has received negligible attention from scholars who have been eager to study every other facet of the conflict, excepting only the one which for so long has given the conflict its crucial form—the military dimension. The proposition here is that the academic study of the conflict in Northern Ireland has been, to a great degree, insulated—intellectually interned, to coin a phrase—from influences and debates at work in the wider academic world. It is suggested that this is especially noticeable in the lack of treatment of the implications of the Northern Ireland conflict in international relations thinking. This state of affairs, it is argued, has its origins in scholarly approaches that have arisen within the field of Northern Ireland studies. It is contended that the restrictive premisses which underpin most studies of Northern Ireland have been embraced, if only implicitly, by the international relations community to
Sean O’Neill, ‘First name terms as Adams and Trimble meet’, Daily Telegraph, September . Quoted in Martin Fletcher, ‘Milestone as old foes sit for first assembly’, The Times, September .
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absolve its neglect. Further, it will be claimed that this neglect is most evident in the scarcity of analysis of the military dimension of the conflict, where our understanding remains rudimentary. Finally, it is submitted that this academic oversight has been detrimental to a full and accurate appreciation of the conflict which reflects poorly on certain scholarly practices both within and beyond Northern Ireland, and that the cumulative effect of all this contains potential dangers for the future.
Stating the case: international relations and the Northern Ireland crisis Before proceeding further one point needs to be made so that readers will be clear about the direction of the argument and, in particular, will understand why most of this discussion is located in the present tense. Despite the peace process, paramilitary ceasefires, the Good Friday Agreement and all the progress that has been made, I shall assume that the conflict is not yet over. Continuing communal hostilities, competing nationalisms and political ideologies, paramilitary punish- ment attacks, the threat from armed splinter groups and, especially, disputes over weapons decommissioning all underscore the persistence of the basic sources of the conflict, now and for years to come. For the moment I concur with the view of Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness that ‘The process of removing the gun from Irish politics is going to be a very lengthy one and very problematic.’ If one examines British international relations literature, both past and present, the impact of the Northern Ireland conflict barely registers. Somewhat ironically, the conflict has received greater, though still sporadic, attention in some American texts. Even when Northern Ireland is mentioned, it is often lumped together unthinkingly with a host of other diverse examples of conflict and left undifferentiated and unconsidered. In one central British international relations text the single reference to Northern Ireland is made in connection with the notion that military responses can exacerbate a conflict: ‘Witness the example of the effects of military violence in Uruguay, in Bangladesh just before its war of liberation from Pakistan or indeed Northern Ireland.’ No further elucidation is offered to back up this assertion. In another central text Northern Ireland is bracketed along with over other conflicts from Afghanistan to Zaire as having been ‘marked by intervention of external powers’. The definition and nature of external ‘intervention’ across these disparate conflicts went unstated as if its meaning were self-evident, which in the case of Northern Ireland it isn’t.
Quoted in Liam Clarke, ‘Hume plea to IRA on arms’, Sunday Times, September . See e.g. Fred Halliday, Rethinking international relations (London: Macmillan, ); Rick Fawn and Jeremy Larkins, eds, International society after the Cold War (London: Macmillan, ). See e.g. David W. Ziegler, War, peace and international politics (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, ), pp. , . Robin Luckham, ‘Militarism: force, class and international conflict’, in Michael Smith, Richard Little and Michael Shackleton eds, Perspectives on World Politics (London: Croom Helm, ), p. . K. J. Holsti, International politics: a framework for analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, ), p. .
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Such glib, unsupported and misleading references are so general as to be devoid of meaning and succeed only in causing one to wonder what other analytical atrocities are committed in the name of international relations. It would be presumptuous to expect students of international relations to examine the impact of the Northern Ireland conflict if there were not much to study or if it were a strictly internal problem with few revelations for the discipline. This is, no doubt, how many international relations scholars would justify their distance from the conflict. But this, of course, is the easy way out. So, to pose the fundamental question: why should international relations be bothered? After all, in comparison with most other wars, that in Northern Ireland is statistically insignificant: fewer than , killed, a few dozen thousand injured. But the bare figures do not tell the whole story. The sunken costs of the conflict have been enormous. The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland have been the single most destabilizing force in British politics for a generation. It has been the canker in the body politic. In addition to the routine of bombings, shootings, massacres and outrages, the conflict has resulted in the militarization and brutalization of large sections of the community in Northern Ireland, the loss of personal freedoms through intense security measures, the disruption of daily life for many in Great Britain and Northern Ireland through bomb hoaxes and security alerts. The conflict has often tainted Britain’s international relationships, inflicting numerous embarrassments and attracting considerable opprobrium on the world stage, with wrongful convictions of prisoners for terrorist offences, maltreatment of paramilitary suspects and human rights violations brought before the European courts. Nor has the Irish Republic escaped from the spill- over effects of the turmoil north of the border; it has experienced its own share of scandals, violence, trauma, internal instability, restrictive legislation and the wholly negative distortion of its relationship with the United Kingdom. That the conflict has affected Britain’s international relationships, often in profound ways, has been confirmed by no less an authority than Tony Blair who, writing in the Observer, admitted that ‘world opinion’ had been the primary determinant guiding British policy towards the peace process. While British opinion had remained stoical in the face of paramilitary violence, Blair maintained, an exclusive security response ‘found limited support outside Britain’ given that ‘there was no political process [in Northern Ireland] that had real legitimacy outside the UK.’ One finds little sense of the significance of the Northern Ireland dimension in British international relations discourse. Nor has coverage improved with the end of the Cold War which has supposedly liberated the discipline from its bipolar outlook into a more mature consideration of the multiple influences, especially those of non-state organizations, at work in world politics. If Northern Ireland is mentioned at all by new studies in post-Cold War inter-
Observer, August .
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national relations, it is usually in the form of some brief and vague allusion to the IRA as an example of how sub-state groups are potentially able to spread their nefarious doings much further afield in an increasingly globalized world. One is not arraigning scholars for their lack of sophisticated insight into the Northern Ireland labyrinth, merely registering surprise at the indifference of a discipline towards a relatively important phenomenon within the context of British international politics. Some will claim that there is a body of literature that has dealt with aspects of the international dimension of the conflict. This is true, and its value should be acknowledged. It should also be stated that since the IRA and loyalist ceasefires in a broader discussion has been initiated across a range of issues that includes conflict resolution, cross-border cooperation and weapons decom- missioning. As a stimulus to widening the debate about Northern Ireland the reduction in violence afforded by the peace process has already paid dividends by opening up previously under-studied areas. While such developments are healthy, I would maintain that studies which seek to illuminate the Northern Ireland conflict with reference to the wider world remain few in number and rarely connect with international relations thinking. Moreover, the majority of those studies have emanated from members of the Northern Ireland-based academic community who have projected their thinking outward, rather than international relations scholars projecting some of their ideas inwards towards Northern Ireland. Either way, the existence of a small corpus of writing on the international aspects of the conflict does not vindicate, or explain, past neglect by students of British international relations who have consistently declined to engage with the single most hazardous factor in British external relations for years. The main contention here, which will be elaborated further later, is that international relations scholars and analysts of the Northern Ireland crisis have passed each other like ships in the night: wending their respective ways, one barely cognisant of the other, with no, or at very least minimal, cross-fertilization of ideas. Even for those unconvinced that the international aspects of the conflict have been under-studied, or sceptical of the need for any redress, there remains one element in respect of which the argument that international relations has excluded itself from the Northern Ireland debate is irrefutable, and this is to be found in the near-complete absence of strategic assessment of the conflict’s military dimension.
See e.g. Peter Willetts, ‘Transnational actors and international organizations in global politics’, in John Baylis and Steve Smith, eds, The globalization of world politics: an introduction to international relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. See e.g. Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: a comparative analysis (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ); Adrian Guelke, Northern Ireland: the international perspective (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ).
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The missing military dimension Anyone who contends that Northern Ireland has been an object of study in international relations has to explain the scarcity of strategic analysis. If the discipline had been intellectually engaged with Northern Ireland then strategic assessment would have been applied as an analytical tool. The military dimensions of the conflict are stark. Although a relatively small conflict, it has spawned in the IRA what many consider to be one of the world’s most effective insurgent groups, which in turn has generated large loyalist paramilitary counter-organizations and a welter of republican and loyalist splinter groups. In all, this murderous milieu has for the best part of years tied down , regular soldiers and a large and heavily armed police force, along with army reservists, spies and elite squads. The ability of the conflict to permeate even the most pressing matters of government was demonstrated when, during the heightened security atmosphere of the Gulf War in , a mortar attack could be successfully launched against Downing Street. The Northern Ireland conflict is not inherently complex. Essentially, it revolves around a dispute over the jurisdiction under which a particular territory should belong. The controversy, and complexity, arise because certain political elements have been prepared to prosecute the dispute through violent means. It is the violence—the war—that has generated the interest and justified the voluminous literature relating to the ‘Troubles’. In other words, the story in Northern Ireland has been a military one. Yet no one has been interested in telling it. Again, there will be those who exclaim that the military aspects have been the subject of continuous coverage by academics, witnessed through the output of literature on ‘terrorism studies’. But this writing has often been based on a faulty, or skewed, method of analysis that focuses on the means and techniques of sub- state violence. The result has often been a blinkered concentration on identify- ing counter-measures against a phenomenon which, in any accurate sense, has never been proved to exist. Terrorism studies are thus often compromised in their objectivity, and this has degraded the search for scholarly understanding of the military side of the conflict. It is a measure of how radically the comprehension of conflicts like that in Northern Ireland has been impeded that, with the end of the Cold War, mainstream academics of international and
For a robust critique of the discipline of terrorist studies see Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan, The ‘terrorism’ industry: the experts and institutions that shape our view of terror (New York: Pantheon, ), esp. pp. –, –. See also Adrian Guelke, The age of terrorism and the international political system (London: I. B. Tauris, ). For a survey of the definitional problems inherent in the discipline see Alex P. Schmid et al., Political terrorism: a new guide to actors, authors, concepts, data bases, theories and literature (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, ), pp. –; Henry W. Prunkin, Shadow of death: an analytic bibliography on political violence, terrorism and low intensity warfare (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, ), pp. –. To illustrate the inaccuracy of results obtained without an adequate definition of ‘terrorism’, see The literature of terrorism: a selectively annotated bibliography, compiled by Edward F. Mikolus (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, ), pp. –. Readers will note in the section on Ireland that works on politics, history and sociology are included irrespective of whether they remotely fit the description of ‘terrorism’.
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military affairs have recently ‘discovered’ the proliferation of small-scale, sub- state war as if it were a new species, and have given expression to this new enthusiasm in a surge of studies on peacekeeping and peace support operations, expeditionary warfare and disintegrating states. None of this deals with why the key dimension of one of the most renowned military stories of our times, and the veritable grand-daddy of ethno-nationalist conflict, has been so neglected. Analysts of Northern Ireland’s crisis are fond of citing the statement of the late John Whyte that, ‘in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily researched area on earth’. Such a statement is difficult to verify, but it has been validated by others in the field. Certainly, academic literature abounds. The University of Ulster’s Register of research on Northern Ireland in documented over research projects in progress. Almost all of the entries were in some way related to the impact of the Northern Ireland tumult. A brief survey of university library shelves reveals the produce of years of learned research on the history, politics, economics, sociology and psychology of the conflict. Given all this attention, most of which has been drawn by the existence of endemic armed conflict in a developed country, it is surprising how little academic scrutiny there has been of military and strategic issues. There are, of course, thousands of studies on ‘the conflict’. But, with some tiny exceptions, analysis of the thinking behind, and the use of, organized armed force is absent. And its absence represents an enormous, and very curious, void in the literature. For example, of the research projects in the Register of
For an assessment of some of the key features of these debates see John Mackinlay, ed., A guide to peace support operations (Providence, RI: Thomas J. Watson Jr Institute for International Studies, Brown University, ), pp. –; Aristide R. Zolberg, ‘The specter of anarchy: African states verging on dissolution’, Dissent : , Summer , pp. –; ‘Joint and combined operations in an expeditionary era’, Defense Analysis Special Edition : , ; G. B. Helman and S. R. Retner, ‘Saving failed states’, Foreign Policy , Winter –; and David A. Lake and Donald Rothschild, ‘Containing fear: the origins and management of ethnic conflict’, International Security : , Fall , pp. –. John Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. viii. The Supervisor of the authoritative Political Collection of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, Robert Bell, was quoted in as describing Northern Ireland as the ‘most documented conflict ever’. Quoted in W. D. Flackes and Sydney Elliott, Northern Ireland: a political directory, – (Belfast: Blackstaff, ), p. vii. A few years later he modified this view, contending that the Israeli–Arab conflict has probably generated more studies. See Anne Maguire, ‘Living history through memorabilia’, Irish Times, July . Register of research on Northern Ireland (Centre for the Study of Conflict, University of Ulster, ). To take two examples of otherwise broad, informative and authoritative assessments of the conflict which examine the politics, culture, economics and ideological aspects of the ‘Troubles’ yet neglect to look at the centrality of the military dimension, see Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, The dynamics of conflict in Northern Ireland: power, conflict and emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) and John Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, ). A further illustration of this may be gained by keyword searches of library indexes which contain significant holdings of material on Irish history and politics. The following search results were obtained on February by accessing two major university library websites. The number of library items held in response to each keyword search is indicated in brackets. The British Library of Political and Economic Science (http://www.blpes.lse.ac.uk): Keywords: Northern Ireland, Politics, Government (); Northern Ireland, Social Conditions (); Northern Ireland, History, Military, – (); Northern Ireland, History, Military (): Ireland, History, Military, th Century (); Violence, Ireland, History, th Century (). University College, Dublin Library (http://www.ucd.ie/~library/): Keywords: Northern Ireland, Politics, Government (); Northern Ireland, Social Conditions (); Northern Ireland, History, Military, – (); Northern Ireland, Military, History (); Ireland, History, Military, th Century (); Violence, Ireland, History, th Century ().
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research only were concerned directly with ‘the conflict’, and of these only three could be described as having any bearing on the study of the role of violence. The scarcity of studies that examine specific themes in the military and strategic ambit or that deal with the intellectual boundaries within which organized armed force has been used is notable. To put the case in more forthright terms, there is a whole raft of areas that have received little or no systematic academic attention. Studies that have assessed the thinking that governs the utility of armed force by the loyalist and republican paramilitaries are few. There are, surprisingly, hardly any studies of official British attitudes to the ‘Troubles’, and there is even less analysis of British security policies. Where is the in-depth account of the strategy of ‘Ulsterization’, or the British approach that led to the necessity of Operation Motorman in , the biggest British military operation since the Suez crisis in and one of the most crucial turning-points in the entire conflict? What about changes in British views after the republican hunger strikes? How efficacious were the campaigns of the SAS and other secret services? The story of the intelligence war (both human and electronic intelligence) waged by the security forces and the IRA is no doubt a very compelling one, but we have yet to hear it. Correspondingly, there is little on the specific operations waged by the paramilitaries. There is no work that examines the IRA’s military campaigns within Northern Ireland, in Great Britain or on the European continent. What was the precise purpose of these activities? Were they successful or not? What about the changes in IRA attitudes following the implementation of the Anglo- Irish Agreement of ? Studies of Protestant/loyalist paramilitary perspectives are still woefully lacking, and it was over twenty years after the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in before any academic assessment of them appeared. It is not that there are no studies that fall within the military and strategic sphere. It is a question of scale. Whereas work on, say, political and social theory as a means of analysing the conflict proliferates, producing focused research on such areas as community relations, cultural approaches, statistical databases, conflict resolution, education and economic policies, the analysis of military matters is patchy and often highly generalized. This observation is not new. J. Bowyer Bell, one of the principal historians of the IRA, has written that ‘essentially, there has been little solid narrative military history and even less tactical or strategical analysis.’ There have been a number of organizational studies and histories of the main actors involved in the promulgation or management of violence: Bowyer Bell’s, Tim Pat Coogan’s, Patrick Bishop’s and Eamonn Mallie’s studies of the IRA;
Register of research on Northern Ireland, entries: ‘Loyalist politics and paramilitaries in Ulster’, ; ‘Loyalist paramilitary ideologies in Northern Ireland’, ; and ‘Violent politics: the role of violence in the political process of Ireland and Northern Ireland’, . Steve Bruce, The red hand: protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). J. Bowyer Bell, The secret army: the IRA, – (Dublin: Poolbeg, ), p. .
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Liam Clarke’s work on the rise of Sinn Fein; Desmond Hamill’s assessment of the British Army in Ulster; Martin Dillon’s and Dennis Lehane’s examination of loyalist paramilitary activities; Jack Holland’s and Henry MacDonald’s work on the Irish National Liberation Army; Mark Urban’s study of the undercover British operations against the IRA; Chris Ryder’s histories of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment. Most of these works have been scrupulously researched and have greatly aided our understanding of the conflict as a whole. There is, however, one very noticeable feature of these studies. Almost all of them are the work of journalists, not academics. There may be many reasons why people think journalists are able to investigate the military side of the conflict with more diligence than academics. The main difficulty for academics, it might be argued, is the problem of obtaining reliable information in such a shadowy area. Journalists, by contrast, are able to cultivate sources over a number of years and piece together a truthful picture by carefully evaluating and cross-referencing information. This technique, one could assert, is scarcely appropriate or possible for academics to employ. Journalists are simply able to do this job much better. Anyone who has studied the problems of Northern Ireland will readily acknowledge the debt they owe to journalistic enquiry. To suggest, however, that because journalists have been so capable academics need not assess, and indeed are not capable of assessing, the military side of the subject would be a curious position for any serious scholar to take: not only would it be defeatist, uninquis- itive and lazy, but it would be an abrogation of the intellectual responsibility to tackle issues of fundamental interest and importance. The reasons for academic reluctance to become involved in the study of the military and strategic facets of Northern Ireland’s military story are no doubt many and varied, but I would suggest they can be narrowed to four central contentions. I further suggest that examining these contentions will indicate the influences that foster intellectual uninterest in the military and international dimensions of the conflict, and reveal that they lack a solid basis in fact and argument.
Shortage of reliable information One of the difficulties that would inhibit research into the military arena would be a shortage of solid evidence. This is the main plank in the argument of those who feel that experienced journalists are in a better position than academics to develop an inside track with the military participants, based on the slow cultivation of usually anonymous sources. The supposition is that it is only these direct lines of contact which can provide authoritative commentaries on military matters. Whether true or not, this viewpoint ignores the wealth of written material available to the analyst in a whole range of relevant subject areas.
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There are literally acres of material on the conflict contained in newspaper archives, university libraries and national libraries across Ireland and Britain. Those wishing to explore issues arising from the conflict have access to hundreds, if not thousands, of documents emanating from loyalist and republican political groups and paramilitaries, their associates and their sympathizers, as well as government departments (including the Northern Ireland Office) and the more mainstream political parties. The sheer weight of primary source evidence to be found ensures that lack of information on military matters per se is not the problem. Since, in general, academics give priority to published information over oral sources, it is surprising that this huge literature has been largely overlooked by scholars as a source of insight into the military and strategic arena. Of course, what may trouble the scholarly mind is not the volume of material on, say, Northern Ireland paramilitary organizations, but the reliability of that information. How much of it can be said to be an accurate reflection of the realities of a given situation? To what extent is the information slanted for propaganda reasons? How does one make sense of the deliberate distortions, conflicting viewpoints and hidden agendas? How can one cross-reference information to check the veracity of any piece of evidence? The worry that evidence surrounding a particular event or situation is less than wholesome might be raised as a significant impediment to academic study of the military aspects of the conflict. But what makes some sources reliable and others not? Is a flysheet collected on the street, or an edition of Combat or the Cockletown News, any less representative of a view of the world than a mainstream newspaper or journal? Are non-state organs any less reliable, more propagandistic, less informed, more dishonest than Cabinet papers that are suppressed for years? Than official statistics that are manipulated to support particular policies? Than government or quasi-official reports drawn up by self-interested civil servants, politicians and pressure groups that wish to portray themselves and their views in a good light? All of these questions are especially appropriate to Northern Ireland, where a propaganda war has been waged by all sides, the official authorities included. By what criteria do we judge whether information is academically sound? Sifting information, piecing together a picture of events from disparate and contradictory sources, is what academic work is all about. The contention that the lack of ‘reliable’ sources is a barrier to study raises the question: what do scholars expect? To have everything served up on a plate? As Arthur Aughey
The Northern Ireland Political Collection of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast is the most important archive in this respect, being dedicated to the meticulous compilation of , items and nearly , periodicals, and provides a uniquely valuable and accessible resource for the analyst. Combat, Ulster Volunteers (Belfast: Ulster Volunteer Force, –). Cockletown News, Joseph Cunningham Sinn Fein Cumann (Newtownabbey: Provisional Sinn Fein, ). See e.g. Liz Curtis, Ireland: the propaganda war: the British media and the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ (London: Pluto, ); David Miller, Don’t mention the war: Northern Ireland, propaganda and the media (London: Pluto, ).
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rightly states: ‘Events can never speak for themselves. Events must be judged, assessed and interpreted, and it is absurd to believe that they can have any status apart from that effort of the intellect.’ Without the effort to sort out and synthesize the complexity of information surrounding any event, the scholarly profession is nothing.
Difficulties of research What the debate over the reliability of source material illustrates most vividly, perhaps, is how reliant academics of many persuasions have become on official, semi-official or institutional sources for their research. The neglect of non-state perspectives is manifest in many parts of the academic firmament. Apart from instances where they are supported financially by governments, the reasons why academics lean heavily on official sources of information are easily discernible and quite understandable. State archives and records, when accessible, are as often as not well documented, systematically organized and easily cross- referenced with other sources of official information. The ease with which access to official data can be gained stands in some contrast to the problems of obtaining information on violent non-state actors in places like Northern Ireland. Whereas state archives are open and transparent, the research process involving sub-state entities in a conflict environment is arduous. Concealment is institutionalized. In general, the whole thrust of active military operations demands that you do not let on to the other side what you are doing. For conspiratorial armed groupings like the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, this necessary secrecy has developed into an understandable paranoia. The illegality of their actions has meant there can be no such thing as open sources of information; no accurate records of meetings, no policy documents, no position papers. Add to the difficulty of obtaining reliable primary source data the extreme politicization of events in Northern Ireland, which further impairs the accuracy of information, and the ‘fear factor’ of working in a potentially dangerous environment, and it is easy to see why journalists have remained pre-eminent. Seasoned journalists have built up networks of reliable informants over the years. This has meant that journalists have been able to offer authoritative military analysis. The day-to-day job of the journalist is one rooted in the present, providing analysis in relation to specific events: a bombing, a shooting, a ministerial summit and so on. For contemporaneous commentary, the journalist reigns supreme with the capability to react quickly to events and provide up-to-date and, it is hoped, accurate information and assessment at any given moment. The journalist’s focus is, however, on the here and now. Some, by dint of reporting
Arthur Aughey, Under siege: Ulster unionism and the Anglo-Irish agreement (London: Hurst, ), p. vii. Bowyer Bell, The secret army, pp. –.
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from the same place for a number of years, gather the necessary background information for in-depth work. But many Northern Ireland correspondents spend much less time in Belfast than a doctoral student is expected to devote to study. Whereas the journalistic vocation is to dig into the nitty-gritty in order to tell a story, the academic ethos is a distanced, dispassionate objectivity, cultivated in order to uncover meaning. There is no reason why academic methodology cannot be applied to the military scene, to take a view over the longer term, to evaluate events, to assemble patterns of behaviour that yield insights into the nature and efficacy of the violence. To do this requires the assiduous accumu- lation of data. The process often relies on the piecing together of journalistic ‘real-time’ reports, matching them with other commentaries to build up a bigger, longer-term picture. Those familiar with the contents of specialist libraries and archives will attest to the ready availability of primary source materials on many aspects of the conflict, including the military dimension. The fact that so much of the information in the public domain originates from journalistic sources, propa- ganda organs and sectional interest groups is not an insurmountable obstacle to the serious academic study of the military and strategic issues arising from the conflict. The individual who ploughs his or her way through the literature trying to construct a coherent picture of paramilitary activity is facing no more and no less difficulty than the Kremlinologists or China-watchers of times past. They could not write as if they had a direct line into the Soviet and Chinese politburos. Instead, they relied on very careful analysis of the outpourings of the state propaganda machines to discern what was happening behind the iron and bamboo curtains. The wider point is that lack of transparency and deficiency in information do not invalidate entire areas of study. Academics always deal with deficient information; as one observer commented: ‘What scholars deal in is evidence. Those who are good at their job reach conclusions that are compatible with available evidence.’ There is no such thing as perfect information, because what objectively happened in any given event ‘could only be known by an omniscient God’. It is because evidence is never fully complete or all-revealing that there is a need for academics in the first place to assess and interpret available information. No one is saying that researching the military dimension is anything other than laborious. It is exacting and onerous. But it is not impossible. Our
See e.g. Robert Bell, Northern Ireland political periodicals –: a bibliography of the holdings of the Linen Hall Library (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, ), pp. vi–vii; Northern Ireland political literature on microfiche, phase I, periodicals, – (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, ). John Garnett, Commonsense and the theory of international politics (London: Macmillan, ), p. . Ibid., p. . As a few scholars have shown in the past: see the work of Bruce, The red hand, and Richard Davis, Mirror hate: the convergent ideology of Northern Ireland paramilitaries, – (Aldershot: Dartmouth, ), esp. pp. –.
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inability to write as if we were looking over the shoulders of the IRA’s Army Council, or the loyalist paramilitaries, or indeed the higher echelons of the security forces, does not degrade the attempt at understanding the military actors in all their complexity. The existence of open source information rules out lack of primary sources as a barrier to the scholarly investigation of military issues.
Intellectual fashion—violence as the political landscape The determinant of whether something is studied or not comes down to choice, both individual and collective. The availability of academically sound material on any topic is largely irrelevant to whether or not it is studied. The reason why academics do not study a particular phenomenon is that, in the end, they choose not to study it. Therefore, there must be other, more intangible factors that account for why such a crucial subject as the military dimension of the ‘Troubles’ has not been given serious academic attention. Addressing this question is problematic, for it is hard to prove a negative; that is, to show why someone has not done something. One clue as to why the politics of violence in Northern Ireland has not been treated in any systematic way was provided by Padraig O’Malley in when he observed:
Conflict is now perceived as a constant, something present in every social or societal situation. Conflict is normal; it only becomes abnormal when we lose our ability to control it. The problem then becomes one of how to manage and regulate the conflict. What social mechanisms come into play to keep the conflict within socially acceptable bounds? How do you identify these mechanisms? And what happens when these mechanisms fail to kick in at critical junctures?
This perceptive comment begins to lift the veil that has obscured much military and strategic analysis. Scholarly writing on conflict management, the political economy of the ‘Troubles’, gender issues, cultural approaches, psycho-social analyses, and so on, all assumes that violence is a fixture of life. The military dynamics of the conflict is passed over as an object of study because it is taken as part of the political landscape. Why should this be so? This is the fault partly of those who study Northern Ireland and partly of those analysts in the wider academic community who take an interest in international relations and strategic affairs, who have often succumbed to the comfortable view, frequently purveyed in much of the media, that Northern Ireland is a complex,
Padraig O’Malley, ‘Reinterpreting Northern Ireland’, Register of research on Northern Ireland, p. vi. We may note here that many of these diverse approaches to the conflict were extant in the study of Northern Ireland for many years before they became intellectually fashionable in the discipline of international relations in the early s.
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unfathomable public order problem, ideally left to the responsible authorities to deal with. Academic insight can be obscured by the inaccessibility of information or by the superabundance of it. Ultimately, though, what guides academics to study one thing and not another is intellectual fashion. Little has been written in English on the violent turmoil in Algeria, the civil war in Liberia or the Karen rebels in Myanmar because the wars in which these societies are embroiled seem remote from our Eurocentric concerns. They are seen as irrelevant, or of marginal interest, and therefore not fashionable to study. It is undoubtedly extremely difficult to obtain information on these small wars; but at base, it is lack of interest that causes the neglect. In Northern Ireland, the opposite is the case. Indeed, it is the fact that endemic armed conflict has persisted in a modern, developed, European country that has attracted the famously large volume of academic and journalistic attention. The very accessibility of the information, with enormous amounts of material churned out by the media, the universities, political parties, para- militaries and interest groups, both in print and now on the Internet, creates its own intellectual deterrence. When it comes to the study of the military aspects, it is assumed that the work is being, or already has been, done by someone—by journalists if no one else. The prevailing view is that it is not worthwhile looking into these matters because there is already too much academic work coming out on Northern Ireland. It is not fashionable. Within this general stance, there are two basic reasons why neither students of Northern Ireland, nor students of international and strategic affairs in general, have explored the underlying dynamics of the violence. First of all, at a fundamental level, the nature of the conflict was always the same. It never evolved beyond relatively low-level acts of individual assassination, bombing and urban terrorism. That the ‘Troubles’ have been characterized by these forms of violence is no doubt a major disincentive for military and strategic analysts outside Northern Ireland. With ‘conventional’ war one can study strategic and tactical manoeuvres, such as the movement of army groups, the problems of supply, and the issues of air and sea power. Thinking about the hypotheticals of a thermonuclear war one can become immersed in Circular Error Probables, Burst Circles and Hard Target Kill Probabilities. In the post- Cold War strategic lexicon one can now dwell on the intricacies of Peace Support Operations, Manoeuvre Warfare and ‘OODA Loops’. Even in large insurgency confrontations, one can write at length about the methods of ‘search and destroy’ or the exotic campaigns of guerrilla bands in the Mekong Delta.
For an illustration it is interesting to see how standard works on international affairs and security studies still compress these costly, destructive wars into generic terms like ‘conflict in the third world’. See e.g. Ken Booth, ed., New directions in strategy and international security (London: HarperCollins, ). Observe–Orientate–Decision–Action: a formula that excites much interest in contemporary military circles.
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But in Northern Ireland war was reduced to a gunman in a doorway or a piece of plastic in a car boot; so that in place of potential books, chapters and articles about the clash of armed forces, the military dimension of Northern Ireland was demoted to potential footnotes on Semtex and the range of an M- rifle. In military terms, Northern Ireland was just a recurring drama played out on a street map with a sniper and a patrol of squaddies and police. Essentially, Northern Ireland was a war going nowhere. To the world at large it was not exotic. It was not esoteric. Nor was it remote and inaccessible. In fact, despite the amount of news generated, it was not especially newsworthy. Nothing different ever happened. So in the minds of analysts there was nothing much to study. Secondly, this idea that Northern Ireland was a dead-end conflict created its own type of stability. In two, five, or ten years’ time, people knew where the conflict was going to be—two or three murders per month, the occasional ‘spectacular’, the perpetual communal strife, the same abuse of civil and human rights, the same routine disinformation from all players about every incident. This predictability appears to give little room for strategic revelation, but it did provide an extremely rich field for the study of the social implications of the conflict which people could access easily without much fear of getting caught up in the firing. That is why there exists such a large disparity between the sociologists of the conflict and the strategists; and once you get sociologists studying something, the debate becomes fixed on ‘what is happening’ at one level of analysis. Any strategic analyst, or indeed anyone else, who asks what is going on at another level runs the risk of being dismissed as mired in semantics or even pathological. And, of course, if you have convinced yourself that the conflict is a product of objective systemic conditions, the violence being merely epiphenomenal, then you close your mind to alternative explanations. In a manner redolent of the wearily repeated phrase ‘the poor will always be with us’, academics have ignored the military undercurrents, claiming that the Irish troubles have always been there, festering away, so why bother getting involved? The notion that the conflict has entrenched itself as part of the political landscape is not a particularly original piece of intellectual penetration. In fact it is rather old, immortalized in Winston Churchill’s comment about the Irish conflict years ago. Speaking of the tremendous changes wrought by the First World War, he observed, in his usual ponderous tone: ‘. . . as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm that has swept the world.’ The belief that the forms of violence represent an unbroken, undeviating stream found a more recent, and more brusque, echo in the words of the political
See notes and above. See e.g. Jim Smyth, ‘Poking at the entrails’, Fortnight, November . Winston Churchill, House of Commons debates vol. , col. , February . Cited in Conor O’Clery, Phrases make history here (Dublin: O’Brien Press, ), p. .
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commentator Edward Pearce: ‘We don’t know, we don’t care, and indeed we care and know so little that we could get more upset about putting sugar in tea, a hot and controversial issue by comparison . . . we feel the tedium of centuries over an issue that combines the excitement of local government with the charm of slow self-loathing. Only Ulster could make murder boring.’ Both of these characterizations of common attitudes towards the ‘Irish troubles’, uttered years apart, well describe the mental compartment in which academic as well as public perceptions have been enclosed. Such opinions have often prevailed in official British thinking in the twentieth century, and it is interesting that Churchill, a man who knew Ireland, and particularly Ulster, well, could encapsulate the whole matter in such an ambiguous phrase, ‘the integrity of their quarrel’. To describe it as a quarrel has all the sneer of the stereotype of a colonial proconsul. But Churchill also recognized the truth, that, of course, there is an integrity to the conflict. Its seemingly perpetual nature should have made that obvious. Unfortunately, it has not seemed obvious to academics, of strategic affairs at least. And so the prevailing sense in which the forms of the conflict are seen to be institutionalized has proved the enemy of scholarly investigation. It encourages academic disengagement because the mental regularization of the Irish ‘quarrel’ implies that nothing of merit can be derived from the study of the military aspects. Yet within Northern Ireland, the intellectual internment of the conflict has freed up academics to discuss all manner of topics without any systematic attention being paid to the mechanics of the violence. This resulted in a situation whereby strategic analysts around the British Isles could hold forth on the Cold War, and now the post-Cold War, environment (having the luxury of dealing with contingencies frequently half a continent or more away) while those who pursued the social study of the Ulster conflict were able to elevate their own contributions precisely by not studying the banality of the killing. Ultimately, academics have fought shy of looking at the military dynamics of the conflict because Northern Ireland was a war too close to the bone for British and Irish society. Those who became involved in the study of violence in Northern Ireland were participating in a dirty little war in their own backyard. Up to a point this scholarly reticence has been understandable. Objectivity was always going to be a serious problem. This is very uncomfortable for a profession that cherishes its ivory towers and has no wish to soil itself with what is seen by many as a squalid tribal conflict. Even today, most scholars probably share, if only unconsciously, Churchill’s hope that the ‘steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ would fade ‘back into the mists and squalls of Ireland’.
Edward Pearce, ‘One long piece of perplexity’, Fortnight, June . Quoted in Jonathan Bardon, A history of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff, ), p. .
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Dominant orthodoxy The assumption that the violence is entrenched and unchanging, the constant political backdrop against which scholarly studies of Northern Ireland are drawn, helps build up an academic culture that militates against the assessment of the conflict’s military nature. In general, long-established modes of enquiry in any field of study encourage the formation of implicit intellectual boundaries within which analysis is confined. The problem, of course, is that the ‘hardening of the categories’ makes it difficult for any discipline to climb out of the ditch into which it has dug itself. Despite the diversity of literature on Northern Ireland, and the apparently wide latitude for research, there is a sense in which there are unspoken ‘rules’ of conduct. To relate the ‘Troubles’ to certain topics in the wider world, conflict resolution for instance, is permissible. But to try to show how our understanding of Northern Ireland is affected by external influences is frowned upon, denied and dismissed as a trivial, if not puerile, debate. The sense is that there is a good deal of self-justification going on which sustains the belief that academics have properly excluded themselves from grubby military matters (not least since journalists are doing a fine job already). Not only is a study of strategic matters considered unprofitable because it will yield few insights of significance, it is seen as a distraction from the more important issue of dealing with the ‘causes’ of the conflict. It is as if the mere insinuation that aspects of the conflict could be re-thought by intellectual forces beyond the province somehow threatens deeply felt beliefs regarding the role of academics within the conflict. Maybe Northern Ireland scholars fear they would have no control over these forces. Whatever the precise reasons for this sensitivity, the impression is that in certain ways the academic community that studies Northern Ireland is insecure when it comes to thinking about the vicious cycle of killing over the past three decades. Possibly, Padraig O’Malley, an American, has come closest to putting his finger on why this may be the case: ‘The conflict is manageable—if you do not live in North or West Belfast, or in a border area, are not a member or former member of the security forces, are not on anyone’s list of “legitimate targets”—in short, if you personally are not at much risk of being killed. Most people live remarkably normal lives … People have distanced themselves from the problem and their responsibility for it.’ Academics for the most part lead reasonably comfortable lives. Yet we hold forth loftily on all sorts of issues relating to the conflict without getting to grips, or even being wanted to be seen to get to grips, with the forces driving the violence. It is not that there is a conspiracy to exclude particular viewpoints. But years of intensive academic attention has created its own received orthodoxy that is not always receptive to new approaches, especially those that question previous academic practice. The cumulative effect of all this is to promote the
O’Malley, Register of research, p. vi.
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intellectual distancing of the conflict of which Padraig O’Malley has written, by encouraging the perception of Northern Ireland as an enclosed, antiquated squabble between two blinkered tribal factions; the very perception most repugnant to the vast majority of scholars of that region. The creation of an intellectual establishment that is content to operate within traditional analytical frameworks is not something that uniquely afflicts Irish studies. No doubt it is present to some degree in all academic modes of thought. I believe that strategic studies and international relations as academic disciplines have had difficulty in expanding their field of vision to encompass the systematic evaluation of low-level wars like that in Northern Ireland, and it seems that in a somewhat similar way Irish political studies has an inherent reticence to expand its horizons. One might argue that a peculiar symbiotic relationship has grown up whereby there is incomprehension within the ambit of Irish studies that some- thing like strategic theory has anything to contribute to the study of Northern Ireland; an attitude reciprocated by the international relations and strategic studies fraternity who regard small wars like Northern Ireland as awkward but peripheral side-issues, even though this type of conflict has destroyed the lives of more people since than most of the established obsessions of strategists. This strange, unintended, even unknowing alliance of mutually supporting indifference is a fundamental reason why, ironically, Northern Ireland remains one of the most written about, yet least understood, conflicts of recent times.
Conclusion I have tried in this article to give an indication of why, despite the large volume of literature on the Northern Ireland conflict, there is still little rigorous academic study either of a military and strategic nature or of the broader international relations implications. It is maintained that the points raised against the study of the military environment lack a solid basis in fact and argument. The barrier to scholarly interpretation is purely a mental hurdle that has grown up in the minds of academics, fortified by three decades of established methods of thinking about the conflict. The assertions that journalists are more capable, that there is an absence of information, or of reliable information, or that violence is so entrenched in the political landscape that it need not be examined, are simply rationalizations of the under-study of the military arena, and an excuse to avoid looking at the more unsavoury aspects of the conflict.
This point has been very well made by Michael Cox, ‘“Cinderella at the ball”: explaining the end of the war in Northern Ireland’, Millennium : , , pp. –. Cox is one of the few scholars who has begun to look critically at some of the international issues affecting the study of Northern Ireland; see also Michael Cox, ‘“Bringing in the international”: the IRA ceasefire and the end of the Cold War’, International Affairs : , . M. L. R. Smith, ‘Holding fire: the missing military dimension in the academic study of Northern Ireland’, in Alan O’Day, ed., Terrorism’s laboratory: the case of Northern Ireland (Aldershot: Dartmouth, ), pp. –.
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That our understanding of the international and military facets of the Northern Ireland conflict remains stunted points to some unpalatable truths. One truth is that British international relations and strategy experts ignored the conflict throughout the years of the Cold War. They were content to view it as an impenetrable problem of local government and internal policing, thus excusing themselves to concentrate on supposedly higher matters of nuclear and conventional defence. This in itself indicates that international relations lacks the impulse for scholarly inquisitiveness. More importantly, it suggests that the discipline, as it has grown up in Britain, remains profoundly uncomfortable, not just with the existence of an odious little war on its own doorstep, but with small-scale warfare generally. Small, sub-state warfare is to be feared because the types of actors and strategies that have evolved organically, often over many years, are seen to contain unbearably complex antecedents not bounded by technological and bureaucratic factors. Moreover, since the violence in Ulster pre-dates the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it defies the pattern of thinking that sees the Cold War as having acted as a ‘structural control on pre-existing ethnic and sub-national aspirations’ which now, ‘no longer suppressed’, have ‘burst into the foreground’. For this reason, Northern Ireland does not fit neatly into the Bosnia/Somalia/Rwanda/former Soviet state category of study that is now obsessed with humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping. So the neglect of the fundamental intellectual motivations behind the participants involved in these small sub-state wars continues, thus underscoring how pitifully late international relations has come to the study of small-scale war, and how deficient, if not irreparably damaged, the discipline remains with regard to this most pervasive form of world conflict. That said, and moving on to the particular subject of this analysis, does it matter if strategists and international relations thinkers have ignored Northern Ireland’s protracted war? Yes: because the lack of scholarly insight in this respect has adversely affected our understanding of the conflict, and this in itself has potentially severe consequences for the province in this period of the peace process. It matters in the first instance from a purely intellectual viewpoint because a rounded investigation into the nature of the conflict has been inhibited by the absence of strategic analysis. Our comprehension of one of the United Kingdom’s most interesting military stories remains not only largely untold, in the ways already described, but also very rudimentary. At the most basic level there is little debate, and even less understanding, about just what exactly the conflict is: is it a small war, an anti-colonial struggle, an ethno-nationalist conflict? What are the true motives of the participants? Is the violence criminal,
Ian Clark, Globalization and fragmentation: international relations in the twentieth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . For a general illustration see Michael E. Brown et al., eds, Nationalism and ethnic conflict (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, ). Richard Betts, ‘Should strategic studies survive?’, World Politics : , October , p. .
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regionalist, separatist? Don’t bother looking for any answers in international relations or strategic studies. More significantly, the academic under-study of the military and strategic dimension has permitted partial, ill-formed images about the conflict to grow up, not least in Northern Ireland, and flourish unchallenged for the best part of years. One powerful illustration of this will suffice here. In the first systematic reinterpretation of the Northern Ireland conflict appeared in print. The author carefully re-examined the tumultuous events of August , when the province erupted into the widespread violence that gave birth to the modern ‘Troubles’. The symbolism and popular imagery surrounding this period were re-evaluated and pursued to show how our understanding of current events has been shaped by such images. In particular, it was suggested that an orthodox view has been engendered which asserts that the violence of the IRA, and by extension the loyalist paramilitaries, has been the inevitable by- product of historical and material conditions. This understanding, shared widely in political, scholarly and journalistic discourse, informs much of the conventional thinking behind the peace process; the idea being that if palliative action is taken to correct the conditions that give rise to the conflict, the violence will eventually dissipate and cease. The author of this work, who is from a Catholic nationalist background, goes on to show that this commonly accepted view of the nature of the violence as a reflex to systemic conditions has, in fact, been assiduously cultivated by the IRA and other paramilitaries to promote their own agendas. In other words, there is nothing remotely involuntary about the violence perpetrated by the para- militaries. They are strategic actors who think, calculate and act for themselves in ways intended to advance their political goals. Thus, an attempt to build a lasting and stable peace on this largely uncontested view of the conflict may, in the long term, prove to be ill-founded. The danger exists that political palliatives, far from removing the causes of the violence, may succeed merely in removing the rule of law. For if you accept that the violence is a product of systemic forces then you acknowledge that you can be manipulated by armed minorities. That way lies the initiation of a process that leads not necessarily to the construction of a more just and equitable society, but potentially to the creation instead of a paramilitary state. Whether one agrees that this is the logic—the dangerous logic—inherent in the peace process, or takes a more optimistic line, there is a need for a more open debate about the nature both of the violence and of the peace process in place of the stifling intellectual conformity that has grown up around the academic study of the Northern Ireland conflict. It is an indictment of conventional scholarly
Smith, ‘Holding fire’, p. . Malachi O’Doherty, The trouble with guns: republican strategy and the Provisional IRA (Belfast: Blackstaff, ). Ibid., pp. –, –. Ibid., pp. –, –.
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approaches that it has taken a quarter of a century for the first serious revisionist history of the conflict to materialize. Should it come as any surprise, I wonder, that it was written by a journalist? Everyone hopes Northern Ireland has embarked on the road to a peaceful transformation. Everyone knows, too, that there are going to be problems ahead. This will undoubtedly keep a lot of academic energy focused on the present. Yet there is a sense in which this will also serve to deflect attention away from examining crucial issues of the past, and excuse scholars from asking awkward questions about their own role, and responsibility, in the conflict. For if one looks back over three decades of strife, one can ponder whether we students of international relations, strategic analysis or Northern Ireland studies have really got all that much of which to be proud. Although this enquiry may be seen as provocative in certain directions, it is actually rooted in the modest belief that the academic vocation is, in the words of one analyst, ‘very much dependent on being able to broaden the normal frame of reference’. It is the attempt to expand existing frameworks, rather than merely reinforcing dominant modes of study, which is important. The failure to try leads to self-imposed intellectual quarantine, which can impede our comprehension of particular socio-political phenomena, in the manner Michael Howard describes: ‘Our awareness of the world and our capacity to deal intelligently with its problems are shaped not only by the history we know but by what we do not know. Ignorance, especially the ignorance of educated men, can be a more powerful force than knowledge. Ethnocentrism in historical studies, whatever its advantages in scholarly training, is likely to feed parochialism in those societies historians serve.’ The current circumstances in Northern Ireland at the time of writing, with the province on the threshold of a peaceful settlement, might provide the opportunity for more avenues of study to be opened up. A lasting and commonly accepted peace, if it truly comes about, will permit a more thorough investigation of the issues raised here. This is the hope rather than the expectation. The more sceptical might suspect that with the here-today-gone- tomorrow attitudes that prevail in certain sections of the social sciences, and indeed without the violent motor of the conflict, Northern Ireland will lose currency as a field of study across the board. It may be that this will be a good thing. Perhaps the place deserves a rest from the deluge of academic attention. On the other hand, without the continuing attempt to explore those things that we as yet still ‘do not know’, it would be a pity, and not just for the historical record, if Northern Ireland, for all that has been written, went down as the forgotten war.
Lawrence Freedman, ‘After the Cold War’, The Report, January , p. . Michael Howard, The lessons of history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
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