Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency In Northern Ireland, 1969-1982

by Montgomery McFate

Overview

British forces conducted operations short of war in Northern Ireland for twenty-five years, yet they were unable to defeat the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). In this heretofore unpublished dissertation from 1994, McFate identifies how certain cultural, legal, and political factors contributed to the longevity of violence in Northern Ireland. Viewing counterinsurgency as a self-reproducing cultural system with its own complex logic, McFate argues that limitations on violence prescribed by the counterinsurgency principle of minimum force paradoxically resulted in a very high degree of sustainability of conflict. Certain other factors—such as emergency security legislation, reverence of military competence, and geo-strategic compression of violence within a cordon sanitaire—enabled normalization and reproduction of the conflict. In opposition to this order, the 1981 Republican hungerstrikes used the silence of the body to incriminate the state, 'embodying' a resistance to the war system of counterinsurgency.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149994144
Publisher:	Wilberforce Codex
Publication date:	12/15/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Montgomery 'Mitzy' McFate is an anthropologist who works on defense and national security issues. Currently, she is the Minerva Chair at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Formerly, she was the Senior Social Scientist for the US Army's Human Terrain System, which she helped build from a 'good idea' on PowerPoint to a program with over five hundred employees, 27 teams deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and $151 million dollar a year budget (making it the US government's largest single investment in social science to date). She was also one of the primary contributors to the 2006 US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. Dr. McFate received a BA from University of California at Berkeley in Social Sciences, a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, and a JD from Harvard Law School. The New Yorker described her as having "an air of humorous cool" and Wired Magazine called her one of the top ten people in the US that President Obama should listen to.