A People's Movement: The Fight for Reform in Northern Ireland

Many authors have sought to understand Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” the nearly thirty-year armed conflict during which more than 3,500 people were killed.
A People’s Movement: The Fight for Reform in Northern Ireland is not just another book about the “Troubles.” In this new work, Ryan Conner shifts our gaze from the period of conflict toward the civil rights movement of the 1960s in order to better understand the relationship between political protest and militancy. Synthesizing published interviews, memoirs, government records, and the latest academic research, Conner argues that the movement’s varieties of protest represented a new form of politics that was distinct from, though not completely independent of, the traditionally republican goal of uniting Ireland through armed force.
Conner demonstrates that we should study social movements and conflict in terms of not only winners and losers or perpetrators and victims, but also through the memories of the prominent and everyday people who witness and participate in these moments.