At Easter of 1916 an armed insurrection, launched by paramilitary republicans, took place in Ireland. When the General Post Office in Dublin was seized on Easter Monday, the rebels declared a free Irish Republic, independent from Great Britain. In the century that has passed since the Easter Rising, each generation of Irish republicans has mounted their own paramilitary campaign to bring about an independent united Ireland, from the War of Independence, to The Troubles, and right up to the modern-day dissident republican violence. By bringing together a range of researchers, from across a variety of academic disciplines, this edited volume analyses the one hundred years of Irish republican violence from 1916 to 2016. The assembled authors assess the evolution of paramilitary violence through a variety of themes, including the IRA from 1919-21, the case of ‘the Disappeared’, the relationship between counterterrorism killings and Provisional IRA bombings, and the analysis of modern-day violent dissident republican statements. Bringing the volume to a close are two long-form interviews with two key actors within the Troubles, Danny Morrison and Billy Hutchinson. In these interviews they discuss their own perspective on one hundred years of Irish republican paramilitary violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence.

The Routledge Handbook of Self-Determination and Secession explores the various debates surrounding the issues of self-determination and secession, and the legal, political, and normative implications they give rise to. Offering a broad survey of the state of the sub-discipline today, the chapters are divided into seven key parts: an Introduction, Self-Determination, Explaining and Justifying Secession, Secession Strategies, Counter-Secession Strategies, International Law and Secession, and Constitutional Law and Secession. The authors, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, explore all the recent approaches to secession and self-determination based on strategic interaction of major actors in a secession process. This handbook will be of great interest to students and researchers from a variety of disciplines including politics and international relations, security studies, and law.

This book examines the question of how to deter a non-state terrorist actor. Can terrorism be deterred? This book argues that current research is unable to find strong cases of deterrence success, because it uses a flawed research design which does not capture the longitudinal dynamics of the process. So far, the focus of inquiry has been on the tactical elements of a state’s counterterrorism strategy, instead of the non-state actor’s grand strategies. By studying the campaigns of Hezbollah, the Palestinians, the Irish Republican Army, Chechens, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and Al-Qaeda/Taliban and ISIS over time, we can see that deterrence strategies that target the cost-benefit calculus of terrorist organizations lead to wars of attrition – which is the non-state organization’s strategy for victory. To escape the attrition trap, the state must undermine the attrition strategy of terrorist organizations by using offensive campaigns that become critical educational moments. The case studies presented here uncover an evolutionary process of learning, leading to strategic deterrence successes. Some terrorist organizations abandoned the use of force altogether, while others abandoned their aspirational goals or resorted to lower levels of violence. These findings should enable policymakers to transition from the failed policy that sought to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the unending war in Afghanistan to a policy that successfully applies deterrence. This book will be of much interest to students of deterrence theory, terrorism studies, war and conflict studies, and security studies.

This volume examines how both victims and perpetrators of terrorism are relevant to our understanding of political violence. While the perpetrators of political violence have been the subject of significant academic research, victims of terrorism and political violence have rarely featured in this landscape. In an effort to capture the vast complexity of terrorism, and to widen the scope of the agenda that informs terrorism research, this book presents a series of analyses that examines the role of the perpetrators, the experience of the victims, the public and media perceptions of both, and given the inherent intricacy of the phenomenon, how we might think about engaging with perpetrators in an effort to prevent further violence. By considering the role of the many actors who are central to our understanding and framing of terrorism and political violence, this book highlights the need to focus on how the interactivity of individuals and contexts have implications for the emergence, maintenance and termination of campaigns of political violence. The volume aims to understand not only how former perpetrators and victims can work in preventing violence in a number of contexts but, more broadly, the narratives that support and oppose violence, the construction of victimisation, the politicisation of victimhood, the justifications for violence and the potential for preventing and encouraging desistance from violence. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, victimology, criminology, security studies and IR in general.

This collection addresses how models from ancient Greece and Rome have permeated Irish political discourse in the century since 1916. The 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish nationalists rose up against British imperial forces, became almost instantly mythologized in Irish political memory as a turning point in the nation's history that paved the way for Irish independence. Its centenary has provided a natural point for reflection on Irish politics, and this volume highlights an unexplored element in Irish political discourse, namely its frequent reliance on, reference to, and tensions with classical Greek and Roman models. Topics covered include the reception and rejection of classical culture in Ireland; the politics of Irish language engagement with Greek and Roman models; the intersection of Irish literature with scholarship in Classics and Celtic Studies; the use of classical referents to articulate political inequalities across gender, sexual, and class hierarchies; meditations on the Northern Irish conflict through classical literature; and the political implications of neoclassical material culture in Irish society. As the only country colonized by Britain with a pre-existing indigenous heritage of expertise in classical languages and literature, postcolonial Ireland represents a unique case in the field of classical reception. This book opens a window on a rich and varied dialogue between significant figures in Irish cultural history and the Greek and Roman sources that have inspired them, a dialogue that is firmly rooted in Ireland's historical past and continues to be ever-evolving.

One hundred years ago, Easter 1916, Irish revolutionaries rose against the British Empire proclaiming a Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. The men and women of the Easter Rising were defeated by the overwhelming force of the British Army, in five days of intense fighting. Their leaders were executed. But the Easter Rising lit a fire that ended with the whole country turning against Westminster’s rule, and founding a nation. But today, the heirs to the Irish state are embarrassed about 1916. They are ashamed that their state owes its origins to a revolution. Along with academics and other commentators in the press and on television they dismiss the Rising as the work of violent fanatics, and the defeat of constitutional politics. Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? explains why today’s Dublin elite are recoiling from the origins of their state in a popular struggle. Where the critics paint the Rising as an armed conspiracy, we explain that it was in fact a revolt against war; not a militaristic upsurge, but the first challenge to the awful slaughter of the First World War. The Statesmen of Europe sacrificed millions upon the altar of war. Their recruiting sergeants in Ireland, Edward Carson and John Redmond sent 200,000 Irishmen into the slaughter and nearly 50,000 were killed. The Easter Rising drew a halt to British recruitment, and the blow to the Empire was the first crack in a growing revolt against the war, followed by the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the German revolution the following year – which ended the conflict. The Easter Rising was an inspiration to those who were challenging the Empires of Europe, from India to Vietnam, from New Zealand to Moscow; it was an inspiration to British activists like John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst; and it was an inspiration to the Irish men and women who rose up against British rule to free their nation.

There’s before 1916 and then there’s after. Between them lies the Easter Rising, when Irish republicans took up arms against British rule and changed the course of their country’s history forever. For though the resistance failed, it failed gloriously; the rebels were no longer a group of cranks and troublemakers in the public eye, but martyrs and national heroes, their example set the way for others and their mission lived on through the century to come. But what sort of country did the Rising create? And how does post-1916 Ireland compare with the aspirations of the rebellion’s leaders, the hopes of Thomas MacDonagh and John MacBride, of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse? One hundred years later, Tim Pat Coogan offers a personal perspective on the Irish experience that followed the Rising. He charts a flawed history that is marked as much by complacency, corruption, and institutional abuse as it is by the building of a nation and the sacrifices of the Republic’s founding fathers.

If historical culture is the specific and particular ways that a society engages with its past, this book aims to situate the professional practice of public history, now emerging across the world, within that framework. It links the increasingly varied practices of memory and history-making such as genealogy, podcasting, re-enactment, family histories, memoir writing, film-making and facebook histories with the work that professional historians do, both in and out of the academy. Making Histories asks questions about the role of the expert and notions of authority within a landscape that is increasingly concerned with connection to the past and authenticity. The book is divided into four parts: 1. Resistance, Rights, Authority 2. Memory, Memorialization, Commemoration 3. Performance, Transmission, Reception 4. Family, Private, Self The four sections outline major themes emerging in public history across the world in the 21st century which are all underpinned by the impact of new media on historical practice and our central argument for the volume which advocates a more capacious definition of what constitutes ‘public history‘.

In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, nonviolent movements for justice have succeeded where violent campaigns have failed. This book examines fourteen cases—eleven movements that succeeded and three that have, until now, failed—and shows why nonviolent strategies work, drawing on the thought of practitioners and theorists. Later chapters examine violent U.S. interventions abroad and at home, as well as citizen movements for nonviolent conflict resolution. As an introduction to nonviolent movements, this text engages students in recent events from the news as well as the history of modern warfare. Bringing in philosophical and religious texts from a diverse set of traditions, author Michael K. Duffey offers a multifaceted argument for embracing nonviolent solutions to conflict.

The volume focuses on the years following the First World War (1918–1923), when political, military, cultural, social and economic developments consolidated to a high degree in Eastern Europe. This period was shaped, on the one hand, by the efforts to establish an international structure for peace and to set previously oppressed nations on the road to emancipation. On the other hand, it was also defined by political revisionism and territorial claims, as well as a level of political violence that was effectively a continuation of the war in many places, albeit under modified conditions. Political decision-makers sought to protect the emerging nation states from radical political utopias but simultaneously had to rise to the challenges of a social and economic crisis, manage the reconstruction of the many extensively devastated landscapes and provide for the social care and support of victims of war.