Irish Transnational Social Movements, Deterritorialized Migrants, and the State System: The Last One Hundred and Forty Years

Abstract

According to scholars who study transnational social movements of "deterritorialized migrants," such movements are: (1) a new phenomena of the modern global age, (2) a response to a modern communications revolution, and (3) a result of the weakening of modern states that contributes to the further decline of the national state system. This article examines the history of Irish conspiratorial brotherhoods over the last one hundred and forty years. It indicates the continuity between contemporary and past transnational movements. Recent social movement globalization studies underestimate the importance of past advances in communications technology and of close personal networks, particularly for social movements subject to repression. Finally, this article argues that the transnational character of social movements poses no inherent challenge to the state system. If transnational political outcomes that transcend the nation-state are more possible today than in the past, it is more due to reconfigured state systems than to the character of transnational social movements.