Managing the Move to Non-Violence: How Social Movements Tactically De-Escalate

• In Event: Violent and Nonviolent Resistance: Tactical Choices and Practical Consequences

Abstract

Social movements typically don’t start out using violence as a primary strategy; violence emerges out of frustration at a lack of progress or sense that more constrained and conventional forms of resistance are unable to achieve meaningful change due to state intransigence. In this sense, violence is sometimes understood as a last resort of movements that have tried other pathways and found nothing but failure at their end. But this conventional view suggests that once movements take up violence as a tactic, there is no going back to a primarily (or even wholly) set of more moderate, less transgressive tactics. However, empirically, this is not the case. Movements move between violence and non-violence—sometimes, eschewing violent tactics altogether. But while this choice can be made by the “heads” of an organization, the tactical decisions that movement elites make to respond to changes in their strategic environment must also carry the “body” of the organization—the rank-and-file members—in order to have any chance of success. However, tactical course-correction of this specific type—moving from violence to non-violence—is particularly fraught, bringing with it the specter of internal division that, if not managed carefully, can result in an exodus of dissidents that can leave the organization in a severely weakened position.

This paper seeks to understand the dynamics of this less-studied tactical shift by drawing on a historical case study of the Irish Republican Army and its resistance to the British government’s policy in Northern Ireland. The IRA’s long-standing campaign against partition in Ireland was punctuated by several attempts by organizational leaders to move to a more political (and less violent) footing; in some cases, this was accompanied by an organizational splintering that left the “head” separated from the “body,” while in other cases, the “head” managed to hold things together sufficiently to avoid a fundamental schism. This analysis compares two such moments—the decision in the late 1960s to embrace party politics and take up seats in the Republic of Ireland’s parliament, leading to a significant split that left the original party leaders with much less power and influence and presiding over an increasingly marginalized organization, and the decision in the 1990s to abandon the armed struggle and focus entirely on political tactics, which the leadership managed to pull off successfully, keeping a majority of members and their political influence intact.

Drawing on historical documents, including speeches from party conferences, newspapers, internal memos, memoirs of key actors, and elite interviews, this project traces how and why the IRA’s fortunes differed in these two moments, focusing in particular on the framing strategies of IRA elites and their ability to manage intra-organizational rivalries. The analysis also considers how these same strategies have fared in a more contemporary media environment, in which online spaces have effectively made such conversations far more horizontal and have amplified dissenting voices, by examining the struggle for control over defining what constitutes legitimate strategy between a wholly political Sinn Féin and new groups of dissident republicans.

Author

• Devashree Gupta, Carleton College