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Political processes and institutions -- Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History by Robert W. White / The Making of Terrorism by Michel Wieviorka
Della Porta, Donatella. Contemporary Sociology 24. 4 (Jul 1995): 347.

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Review.

Texto completo
Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History, by Robert W. White. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 224 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-313-28564-0. The Making of Terrorism, by Michel Wieviorka. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 370 pp. $52.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-89650-1. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0-226-80652-8. In Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History, Robert W. White analyzes, with a cross-time perspective, the motivations of different generations of Irish Republicans. With a cross-national perspective, Michel Wieviorka's The Making of Terrorism compares, instead, three forms of terrorism: left-wing terrorism (as exemplified by the Italian case during the late '70s), nationalistic terrorism (on the basis of research on the Basque independentists), and international terrorism (in particular, violence in the Palestinian movement). Although different from one another in their empirical objects and approaches, the two volumes provide interesting contributions to the study of political violence. First of all, they both analyze political violence, even in its most radical forms, in the framework of the categories elaborated to study collective action and social movements. As opposed to most of the research in the field of terrorism studies, they put political violence in context, studying the way in which social and political conflicts escalate. Terrorism is therefore analyzed as an outcome of complex interactions involving social movements, countermovements, and the state. This is a promising approach, but very rare indeed. On the one hand, the field of terrorism studies has too often defined political violence as the making of the evil - of wrong ideologies or psychopathological personalities. On the other, the sociology of social movements prefers to avoid the topic of the most "distasteful" form of collective actions. As both White's and Wieviorka's investigations show, underground organizations arise from within mass movements, whose struggles they claim to continue. Moreover, the militants of underground organizations come often from political careers in movement organizations, and believe they pursue in the underground the same aims they were fighting for with legal means. On this second point--the individual motivations within the terrorist organizations--White's and Wieviorka's contributions are particularly valuable. Both scholars, in fact, analyze terrorism not as a pathological product of systemic dysfunction, but as a set of strategic actions that can be understood only by looking at the motivations of those who choose the underground. In order to understand the actors' strategies, the two authors elaborate research methods based on field work with members of underground organizations. Rejecting old stereotypes, they demonstrate that methodologies based on interactions between researchers and actors are feasible and useful even in studies of underground organizations. The two research methods, so different from one another, both deserve attention. White's research, conducted between 1984 and 1990, is based on life history interviews with people involved in the radical wing of the Republican Movement in Ulster and in the Irish Republic. The bulk of the research is composed of 65 interviews focusing on the motivations for joining the Republican movements, while additional interviews with prominent Republicans provide information on organizational dynamics. Although, as White admits, this method allows for biases resulting from interviewer/respondent intere actions as well as from the failings of memory, they also provide the best possible sources for knowledge of how the militants perceive (and construct) their external reality. A disciple of the French sociologist Alain Touraine, Wieviorka applies to the study of Italian and Basque terrorists Touraine's method of "sociological intervention"--that is, an experimental method based on the interaction between the researcher and the actor. The research team constitutes small, artificial groups of about 10 movement participants who are taken as representatives of the different tendencies inside the movements. The sociologist observes the way in which the groups react to a series of stimuli--including the presence of codiscussants--and interprets group dynamics as an expression of movement dynamics. The methodological differences reflect the different aims of the research. The study of the Provisional Irish Republicans is aimed at reconstructing the history of the Republican movement, and of Ireland, on the bases of sources other than the official ones. A lot of space in the book is devoted to the interviewees' recollections of old and recent Irish history. Institutional events are reinterpreted through the personal experiences of some participants, who challenge the mainstream, institutional images. One main empirical result of the book is the description of three different patterns of recruitment in the Republican movement: The political commitment of the founders of the Provisional IRA and the Provisional Sinn Fein developed out of family traditions; post-1969 recruits living in Northern Ireland were moved by personal experience with state violence; post-1969 recruits living in the Irish Republic were drawn to support the Republicans by social ties with those involved in the Republican movement. The aim of the method of sociological intervention is, in Wieviorka's words, "to bring to light the traces of a social movement that had seemingly been occluded by other meanings inherent to the struggle in which it was embedded" (p. 299). In the phase of "conversion," intervention groups are asked to discuss and adopt hypotheses proposed by the researchers, thus acquiring a better understanding of their movement identity. When applied to the study of terrorism, however, sociological intervention does not attempt to isolate from the several potential meanings of collective action those that appear to the researchers to be the most important. Instead, its task is "rather to deconstruct that which violence fuses together, to bring lost meanings into light, and to rediscover the face of a movement, if not that of an antimovement" (p. 300). The main hypothesis of the book is that terrorism is the most extreme form of an antimovement, inverting the principles of identity, opposition, and totality that a movement is able to combine. Although the two methods provide a rich account of the rise and evolution of terrorist organizations, the use the two authors make of their empirical results is not always totally convincing. White's focus is, for instance, on an alternative account of Irish history provided by the protagonists of radical movements. Although he combines his oral sources with written documents in order to reduce their bias, White tends to look at his material as a description of "reality."

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One could, however, object that as much as but not less than the official sources, oral sources represent subjective "constructions" of external reality. Indeed, the long testimonies reported in the book are interesting exactly because they explain how particular readings of events push citizens to "take their guns" against democratically elected governments. Wieviorka claims to provide an explanation in which the "analytical categories" presented are "circumscribed within an all-encompassing whole which requires that one study, instead of causes and factors, the ideological and practical organizations of ideals, which are themselves rooted in social or political relationships" (p. 79). In his theory, terrorism is an "inversion" of a social movement, or the alienation of one's social movement of reference. Although Wieviorka discusses the role of intellectual, media, and organizational processes in the evolution of underground organizations, his search for a "grand theory" that could provide an all-encompassing explanation for such a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon seems too ambitious. Moreover, by emphasizing the role of the actor over that of the external situation, one risks a voluntaristic, if not circular, explanation, in which the use of terrorist repertoires derives from the "terrorist" (or "inverted") identities of the social actors. In my reading, the best contributions of the two volumes are not to the rewriting of an alternative Irish history nor to the expansion of Touraine's sociologie de l'action. The most important contributions are, instead, at the level of a middle-range sociological theory that helps shed new light on the most radical forms of political violence. Let me list a few important results of White's and Wieviorka's studies. First of all, both authors stress the importance of personal ties, especially deep friendship or kinship, in motivating participation in radical organizations. For instance, in the third chapter of his book, when talking about the founders of the Provisional IRA, White emphasizes the role of kinship ties in recruitment to the organization (out of sixteen respondents, nine had direct connection to the Republicans through their parents, another three through their uncles, and one through his grandparent). Friendship ties have long been considered important for recruitment to collective action, and especially to its most demanding forms. The research shows, however, how these ties work through the creation of a sort of counterculture that provides shared meanings for external events and a particular reading of history. Second is the double role of state violence in increasing the propensity towards violence. As could be expected, the interactions with state violence, as well as with counter-violence, produce spirals of revenge and the development of military skills. But maybe even more important than the concrete experience with violence is the effect of the delegitimation of the authority of state institutions. As White well illustrates, especially for those who joined the Provisionals in Northern Ireland after 1969, the precipitating event in the choice of the underground was Bloody Sunday--when, on January 30, 1972, British soldiers killed 14 demonstrators at a march organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In general, the widespread perception that when the British army took the Protestant side it delegitimized their authority and served as a powerful push toward the use of violence against those who were seen as not respecting their own rules. It was in fact between 1969 and 1972 that the Provisional IRA grew from 26 members to about 2000, while the number of incidents rose from 83 (with 13 deaths) in 1969, to 12,481 (with 467 deaths) in 1972. In the same period, the political aims of the movement escalated from "British Rights for British Subjects" to independence. As White writes, "For the nationalist working class in Northern Ireland, the primary politicizing agent in the early 1970s was violence from the Loyalists, the police, and the British army" (p. 88). It was in fact the encounter with unjust authorities that justified violence, not only in the North, but also in the South, where activists had no direct experience with violent escalation but joined out of emotional indignation for Bloody Sunday or the death of 10 IRA prisoners during their hunger strike in 1981. A third interesting result is the analysis of the self-perpetuating processes that produce spirals of violence. The logic of secrecy of their organizations isolated activists in the underground from external reality, forcing them to break professional, personal, and family ties. Living underground, the terrorists spent most of their time looking for money and hideouts, and making dangerous contacts with organized crime. Small group dynamics produce internal conflicts and splits. To gain media coverage, actions have to become more and more sanguinary. This brings about the phase that Wieviorka calls "inversion," when "all signs point to a negation of the principles and ideals that inspired their very inception. Whereas one had previously suffered on behalf of a humankind mistreated by the system, now one behaves like a barbarian, not only outside of one's organization but also within it. Suspicion, violence, and self-destruction reign at its very heart" (p. 61). Copyright American Sociological Association Jul 1995

Indexacin (detalles)
Materia

Citar Terrorism; Palestinians; Oral history; Nonfiction; Cross cultural studies

Lugar Empresa Ttulo

Northern Ireland, Italy, Basque region Spain Irish Republican Army, IRA Political processes and institutions -- Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History by Robert W. White / The Making of Terrorism by Michel Wieviorka Della Porta , Donatella Contemporary Sociology 24 4 347 1995 Jul 1995 1995 American Sociological Association Washington United States Bibliographies, Sociology, Sociology--Abstracting, Bibliographies, Statistics 00943061 COSOAG Scholarly Journals English Book Review-Comparative 02456164

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