Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency In Northern Ireland, 1969-1982

Montgomery McFate

Description

British forces conducted operations short of war in Northern Ireland for twenty-five years, yet they were unable to defeat the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). In this heretofore unpublished dissertation from 1994, McFate identifies how certain cultural, legal, and political factors contributed to the longevity of violence in Northern Ireland. Viewing counterinsurgency as a self-reproducing cultural system with its own complex logic, McFate argues that limitations on violence prescribed by the counterinsurgency principle of minimum force paradoxically resulted in a very high degree of sustainability of conflict. Certain other factors—such as emergency security legislation, reverence of military competence, and geo-strategic compression of violence within a cordon sanitaire—enabled normalization and reproduction of the conflict. In opposition to this order, the 1981 Republican hungerstrikes used the silence of the body to incriminate the state, 'embodying' a resistance to the war system of counterinsurgency.

Sujets

• Security International
• Security National
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780990574309
• Langue: English

Extrait

Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969-1982
 
 
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of
Yale University
In Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
 
 
By
Montgomery Cybele Carlough
 
December, 1994

 
 
Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland 1969-1982
Copyright © 1995, 2014 Montgomery McFate
All rights reserved.
 
Cover photo
Copyright © 2014 Arlene Wege
All rights reserved.
 
Electronic Edition
ISBN
ISBN-13: 978-0-9905-7430-9
 
Published by Wilberforce Codex
New York, New York
 
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
 
www.paxbritannica.net
preface [2014]
In 1990 when I began graduate school at Yale, few anthropologists had any interest in armed conflict. Faculty and fellow students suggested that my research might fit better in the political science department. I found this suggestion disconcerting - why should war be excluded from anthropological inquiry? How human beings fight is as much a matter of culture as table manners, death rituals, or transgendered prostitution. And, after visiting Northern Ireland for the first time, it was clear to me that Republicanism was not just a political philosophy; it was a unique culture with its own norms, narratives, symbols, rituals, and language. Decades of war (or hundreds of years, depending on who is counting) had destroyed neither Republican culture nor Republican political philosophy, but rather had strengthened, clarified and deepened it. It was impossible not to empathize with these self-disciplined, courageous people who continued to fight British forces despite the fact that the consequence was likely to be death or imprisonment; despite the fact that they had neither the manpower nor the firepower to secure a military victory; and despite the fact that their political goal of unification of Ireland’s 32 counties was absent from the political agenda of the Republic of Ireland.
This complex mixture of politics, violence and culture was going to be the subject of my dissertation. After a research trip to Northern Ireland in 1991, I returned to Yale. One afternoon browsing in the Sterling Memorial Library, I found Allen Feldman’s book, Formations of Violence:   Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland . Holding it in my hands, I had the experience all graduate students dread: somebody else had written what I intended to write, and had done a much better job than I ever could have. That afternoon, I went to see my advisor Professor Hal Scheffler and told him I was dropping out and going to law school. Smiling with bemusement at my predicament, Scheffler told me “you’ve done the hard part – the fieldwork. Compared with that, the writing will be easy.” He asked me to ponder how the topic could be reframed so that it would not duplicate existing work, but still draw upon the research I’d already conducted.
I spent that weekend thinking about the fallacies and assumptions underpinning the conventional academic approach to political violence. At the time in the early 1990s, most journalists and scholars who wrote about Northern Ireland treated it as an ethno-sectarian conflict or as ‘terrorism’ – spectacular violence decontextualized from history, community and politics. But unlike political science, anthropology usually begins with subjective inquiry into ground truth as perceived by indigenous inhabitants. What do the locals have to say? What are their views about cross-cousin marriage, witchcraft or flint knapping? How do they make sense of the world? During the time I had spent in Ireland, nobody in the Republican community identified their adversary as the Loyalists or Protestants. Instead, in response to any question about sectarian conflict, they would provide a list of historical examples of Protestants who had fought for the Republican cause (such as Wolfe Tone). Likewise, they didn’t frame their own violence as terrorism – they defined it as a war, viewed the British security forces as the enemy, and saw themselves as soldiers. The Republican version of reality barely intersected with outsider’s interpretations of their world. What if I accepted the Republican version of reality as truth? What if all the poetry, songs, speeches, and books produced by the IRA and its supporters – generally dismissed as self-justifying propaganda – were accepted at face value?
 
research
 
If this was indeed a war between the British Army and the Provisional IRA, then most journalists and scholars were asking the wrong questions about the wrong subject. Instead of focusing on the historical origins of the conflict, examining the effect of sectarian divisions on civil society, or positing the IRA as a criminal gang (all topics du jour in the early 1990s), the more compelling question was: what social, legal, political, cultural or economic forces sustained the conflict? War is more than just uninhibited violence that expresses some primordial instinct inherited from our club-wielding ancestors; war is a social construct. Ireland was Britain’s first colony, and fighting a war against the same enemy for hundreds of years meant that these adversaries knew each other very well; they understood each other’s political goals, strategic weaknesses, rhetorical postures, and tactical predilections. Through their long and violent interaction these adversaries had developed unwritten norms, shared patterns, and certain expectations about the other’s behavior. In fact, these adversaries were as much opposed as they were bound together; through their relationship as combatants, they had constructed each other. Moreover, any conflict that could not be resolved after roughly 800 years (again, depending on who is counting) had to be viewed as a self-perpetuating system, bounded geographically, with interconnected parts, self-governing rules, and recurrent processes.
With those ideas whirring around in my mind, I went back to the UK. Nothing in my graduate school education or my personal life had prepared me to research military topics. I understood the conflict in Northern Ireland from the Republican point of view, but my knowledge of the British Army had come from WWII movies and popular novels such as Kingsley Amis’ fantastic Anti-Death League . So, beginning with Clausewitz, I educated myself on how state forces were organized, how they developed doctrine, how they conceptualized leadership, how they used history as a resource, how the application of force was managed, and so on. Then, I began to read about British military history – from Agincourt to Isandlwana to the Falklands. Only then, with some solid foundation, did I begin to read post-structuralist military theory. Guidance came from many sources: the faculty at Sandhurst, the archivists at the Imperial War Museum, the librarians at the Royal United Services Institute, and the many soldiers with whom I became friends. Hearing their personal stories (and understanding those individual experiences within the larger context of the war) humanized the conflict but also showed me the terrible personal cost paid by soldiers and their families. It was impossible not to admire these self-disciplined, courageous soldiers who continued to fight the IRA despite the fact that the consequence might be death or injury; despite the fact that they were prevented from using the manpower and the firepower necessary to secure a military victory; and despite the fact that their government’s political goal contradicted the constitutional provisions of the Republic of Ireland. In the early 1990s, Northern Ireland seemed like war which neither combatant could win and that both were doomed to fight in perpetuity.
 
objectives/objectivity
 
During the years I spent conducting research, I had the rare opportunity to see a war from both sides, with access neither combatants nor most journalists have. During the fieldwork I internalized the subjective viewpoints of the people I was interacting with, on both sides of the conflict. Fieldwork – for me anyway – required complete suspension of disbelief, total psychological immersion, and most importantly, an acknowledgement of the truth of each combatant’s narrative. Afterwards, while I was writing, holding both perspectives simultaneously in my mind produced some minor cognitive dissonance. Like a Zen koan presenting a paradox that cannot be solved through reasoning alone, I knew that both combatant cosmologies were absolutely true, and yet both were grievously false. As an anthropologist, I believed that my role was not to validate, legitimate, advocate or represent the views of either the British Army or the Provisional IRA. They were perfectly capable of doing so without my assistance, and to believe otherwise constitutes the worst type of intellectual paternalism. Rather, my task as an anthropologist was to approach the complexities of the war as a detached observer. By detached observation I mean aspiring to see a phenomenon – in this case the war in Northern Ireland – as a social totality, without interjecting my political views, my ethics, or my emotions into the object of study. As a social scientist, my goal was to understand how these two military organizations interacting over hundreds of years produced a unique war system – self-regulating, autonomous, resilient, and beyond the ability of most participants to apprehend. (Certainly I have read all the critiques of positivism in social science, and concur that all observation already distorts reality through the inclusion of