Civil rights mobilization and repression in Northern Ireland: a comparison with the US Deep South

Abstract

In the context of 1960s contention, the outbreak of the Troubles would suggest the distinctiveness of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. Yet a comparison with the civil rights struggle in the US Deep South indicates otherwise. I rely upon original archival sources located in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and on the vast literature on the US Civil Rights Movement to show how the processes of mobilization, counter‐mobilization and repression in the two countries shared striking similarities. Blacks in the US South and Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland shared a similar structural position within their societies, which partially explains the similarities in their mobilizations. Likewise, the reaction of local majority communities to civil rights mobilization was informed by the social mechanism of “attribution of threat,” unleashing similar patterns of counter‐mobilization and police repression. However, while the Civil Rights Movement in the US was devoted to nonviolence, activists in Northern Ireland utilized nonviolence in their rhetoric, but not in their protest activities.