CWSS Workshop: Intimidation and Non-Lethal violence in Conflict

‘“More through fear than love”? Intimidation, coercion, and the perception of violence in revolutionary Ireland’

Brian Hughes’s paper will examine attempts by the Irish Republican Army to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent within local communities between c. 1920 and the ‘official’ outbreak of civil war in Ireland in June 1922. In particular, it will focus on the successes and failures of Irish Republican Army (IRA) demands for food, money, and shelter under threat and punishment. By doing so it will attempt to demonstrate, as Stathis Kalyvas does, that equating civilian behaviour with popular support underestimates the capacity of Irish civilians to ‘hedge’, to waver, to act out of self-interest; to be motivated by fear, or love, or neither.

Assuming a homogenous response to violence and intimidation is also problematic. Taking the alleged ‘exodus’ of Irish Protestants from the twenty-six southern counties as an example, the paper will conclude by suggesting that the range of civilian testimony available to historians of the conflict should allow us to further probe how ordinary people understood the violence that took place around them, and how they perceived threat and harm. This, it will be argued, is just as important as trying to understand what may or may not have actually happened.

‘“The right to live in my own country”: Intimidation and expulsion in the Irish Civil War’

Gemma Clark’s paper aims to reflect and expand on key conclusions from Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge, 2014), which proves that threats against person and property, and attacks on homes/businesses/infrastructure, were much more pervasive than was interpersonal violence, during Ireland’s relatively contained – but nonetheless cruel – civil war of 1922–23. Specifically, this paper examines some of the intimidating acts (boycott, verbal and written warnings, animal maiming, land seizure, etc.) used to exert social, financial and psychological pressure on certain individuals and families in Munster (south-west Ireland), leading to their rejection by – even expulsion from – the local community.