An Oral and Interpretative History by Robert W. White _ the Making of Terrorism by Michel Wieviorka - ProQuest

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Political processes and institutions -- Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative Historyby Robert W. White / The Making of Terrorism by Michel WieviorkaDella Porta, Donatella. Contemporary Sociology 24. 4 (Jul 1995): 347.

Review.

Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History, by Robert W. White. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 224 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN:0-313-28564-0.

The Making of Terrorism, by Michel Wieviorka. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 370 pp. $52.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-89650-1. $19.95 paper.

ISBN: 0-226-80652-8.

In Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History, Robert W. White analyzes, with a cross-time perspective, the motivations of differentgenerations of Irish Republicans. With a cross-national perspective, Michel Wieviorka's The Making of Terrorism compares, instead, three forms ofterrorism: left-wing terrorism (as exemplified by the Italian case during the late '70s), nationalistic terrorism (on the basis of research on the Basqueindependentists), and international terrorism (in particular, violence in the Palestinian movement).

Although different from one another in their empirical objects and approaches, the two volumes provide interesting contributions to the study of politicalviolence. First of all, they both analyze political violence, even in its most radical forms, in the framework of the categories elaborated to study collectiveaction and social movements. As opposed to most of the research in the field of terrorism studies, they put political violence in context, studying the way inwhich social and political conflicts escalate. Terrorism is therefore analyzed as an outcome of complex interactions involving social movements,countermovements, and the state. This is a promising approach, but very rare indeed. On the one hand, the field of terrorism studies has too often definedpolitical violence as the making of the evil - of wrong ideologies or psychopathological personalities. On the other, the sociology of social movements prefersto avoid the topic of the most "distasteful" form of collective actions. As both White's and Wieviorka's investigations show, underground organizations arisefrom within mass movements, whose struggles they claim to continue. Moreover, the militants of underground organizations come often from politicalcareers in movement organizations, and believe they pursue in the underground the same aims they were fighting for with legal means.

On this second point--the individual motivations within the terrorist organizations--White's and Wieviorka's contributions are particularly valuable. Bothscholars, in fact, analyze terrorism not as a pathological product of systemic dysfunction, but as a set of strategic actions that can be understood only bylooking at the motivations of those who choose the underground. In order to understand the actors' strategies, the two authors elaborate research methodsbased on field work with members of underground organizations. Rejecting old stereotypes, they demonstrate that methodologies based on interactionsbetween researchers and actors are feasible and useful even in studies of underground organizations.

The two research methods, so different from one another, both deserve attention. White's research, conducted between 1984 and 1990, is based on lifehistory interviews with people involved in the radical wing of the Republican Movement in Ulster and in the Irish Republic. The bulk of the research iscomposed of 65 interviews focusing on the motivations for joining the Republican movements, while additional interviews with prominent Republicansprovide information on organizational dynamics. Although, as White admits, this method allows for biases resulting from interviewer/respondent intereactions as well as from the failings of memory, they also provide the best possible sources for knowledge of how the militants perceive (and construct) theirexternal reality.

A disciple of the French sociologist Alain Touraine, Wieviorka applies to the study of Italian and Basque terrorists Touraine's method of "sociological

intervention"--that is, an experimental method based on the interaction between the researcher and the actor. The research team constitutes small,artificial groups of about 10 movement participants who are taken as representatives of the different tendencies inside the movements. The sociologistobserves the way in which the groups react to a series of stimuli--including the presence of codiscussants--and interprets group dynamics as an expressionof movement dynamics.

The methodological differences reflect the different aims of the research. The study of the Provisional Irish Republicans is aimed at reconstructing thehistory of the Republican movement, and of Ireland, on the bases of sources other than the official ones. A lot of space in the book is devoted to theinterviewees' recollections of old and recent Irish history. Institutional events are reinterpreted through the personal experiences of some participants, whochallenge the mainstream, institutional images. One main empirical result of the book is the description of three different patterns of recruitment in theRepublican movement: The political commitment of the founders of the Provisional IRA and the Provisional Sinn Fein developed out of family traditions;post-1969 recruits living in Northern Ireland were moved by personal experience with state violence; post-1969 recruits living in the Irish Republic weredrawn to support the Republicans by social ties with those involved in the Republican movement.

The aim of the method of sociological intervention is, in Wieviorka's words, "to bring to light the traces of a social movement that had seemingly beenoccluded by other meanings inherent to the struggle in which it was embedded" (p. 299). In the phase of "conversion," intervention groups are asked todiscuss and adopt hypotheses proposed by the researchers, thus acquiring a better understanding of their movement identity. When applied to the study of

terrorism, however, sociological intervention does not attempt to isolate from the several potential meanings of collective action those that appear to theresearchers to be the most important. Instead, its task is "rather to deconstruct that which violence fuses together, to bring lost meanings into light, and torediscover the face of a movement, if not that of an antimovement" (p. 300). The main hypothesis of the book is that terrorism is the most extreme form ofan antimovement, inverting the principles of identity, opposition, and totality that a movement is able to combine.

Although the two methods provide a rich account of the rise and evolution of terrorist organizations, the use the two authors make of their empirical resultsis not always totally convincing. White's focus is, for instance, on an alternative account of Irish history provided by the protagonists of radical movements.Although he combines his oral sources with written documents in order to reduce their bias, White tends to look at his material as a description of "reality."

tical processes and institutions -- Provisional Irish Republicans: A... http://search.proquest.com/docview/233600384/13C5B49C29031CC...

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Indexacin (detalles) Citar

Materia Terrorism;Palestinians;Oral history;Nonfiction;Cross cultural studies

Lugar Northern Ireland, Italy, Basque region Spain

Empresa Irish Republican Army, IRA

Ttulo Political processes and institutions -- Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral andInterpretative History by Robert W. White / The Making of Terrorism by MichelWieviorka

Autor Della Porta, Donatella

Ttulo de publicacin Contemporary Sociology

Tomo 24

Nmero 4

Pginas 347

Ao de publicacin 1995

Fecha de publicacin Jul 1995

Ao 1995

Editorial American Sociological Association

Lugar de publicacin Washington

Pas de publicacin United States

Materia de la revista Bibliographies, Sociology, Sociology--Abstracting, Bibliographies, Statistics

ISSN 00943061

CODEN COSOAG

Tipo de fuente Scholarly Journals

Idioma de la publicacin English

Tipo de documento Book Review-Comparative

Nmero de acceso 02456164

One could, however, object that as much as but not less than the official sources, oral sources represent subjective "constructions" of external reality.Indeed, the long testimonies reported in the book are interesting exactly because they explain how particular readings of events push citizens to "take theirguns" against democratically elected governments.

Wieviorka claims to provide an explanation in which the "analytical categories" presented are "c ircumscribed within an all-encompassing whole whichrequires that one study, instead of causes and factors, the ideological and practical organizations of ideals, which are themselves rooted in social or politicalrelationships" (p. 79). In his theory, terrorism is an "inversion" of a social movement, or the alienation of one's social movement of reference. AlthoughWieviorka discusses the role of intellectual, media, and organizational processes in the evolution of underground organizations, his search for a "grandtheory" that could provide an all-encompassing explanation for such a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon seems too ambitious. Moreover, byemphasizing the role of the actor over that of the external situation, one risks a voluntaristic, if not circular, explanation, in which the use of terrorist

repertoires derives from the "terrorist" (or "inverted") identities of the social actors.

In my reading, the best contributions of the two volumes are not to the rewriting of an alternative Irish history nor to the expansion of Touraine's sociologiede l'action. The most important contributions are, instead, at the level of a middle-range sociological theory that helps shed new light on the most radicalforms of political violence. Let me list a few important results of White's and Wieviorka's studies. First of all, both authors stress the importance of personalties, especially deep friendship or kinship, in motivating participation in radical organizations. For instance, in the third chapter of his book, when talkingabout the founders of the Provisional IRA, White emphasizes the role of kinship ties in recruitment to the organization (out of sixteen respondents, nine haddirect connection to the Republicans through their parents, another three through their uncles, and one through his grandparent). Friendship ties have longbeen considered important for recruitment to collective action, and especially to its most demanding forms. The research shows, however, how these tieswork through the creation of a sort of counterculture that provides shared meanings for external events and a particular reading of history.

Second is the double role of state violence in increasing the propensity towards violence. As could be expected, the interactions with state violence, as wellas with counter-violence, produce spirals of revenge and the development of military skills. But maybe even more important than the concrete experiencewith violence is the effect of the delegitimation of the authority of state institutions. As White well illustrates, especially for those who joined the Provisionalsin Northern Ireland after 1969, the precipitating event in the choice of the underground was Bloody Sunday--when, on January 30, 1972, British soldierskilled 14 demonstrators at a march organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In general, the widespread perception that when the British

army took the Protestant side it delegitimized their authority and served as a powerful push toward the use of violence against those who were seen as notrespecting their own rules. It was in fact between 1969 and 1972 that the Provisional IRA grew from 26 members to about 2000, while the number ofincidents rose from 83 (with 13 deaths) in 1969, to 12,481 (with 467 deaths) in 1972. In the same period, the political aims of the movement escalatedfrom "British Rights for British Subjects" to independence. As White writes, "For the nationalist working class in Northern Ireland, the primary politicizingagent in the early 1970s was violence from the Loyalists, the police, and the British army" (p. 88). It was in fact the encounter with unjust authorities thatjustified violence, not only in the North, but also in the South, where activists had no direct experience with violent escalation but joined out of emotionalindignation for Bloody Sunday or the death of 10 IRA prisoners during their hunger strike in 1981.

A third interesting result is the analysis of the self-perpetuating processes that produce spirals of violence. The logic of secrecy of their organizationsisolated activists in the underground from external reality, forcing them to break professional, personal, and family ties. Living underground, the terroristsspent most of their time looking for money and hideouts, and making dangerous contacts with organized crime. Small group dynamics produce internalconflicts and splits. To gain media coverage, actions have to become more and more sanguinary. This brings about the phase that Wieviorka calls"inversion," when "all signs point to a negation of the principles and ideals that inspired their very inception. Whereas one had previously suffered on behalfof a humankind mistreated by the system, now one behaves like a barbarian, not only outside of one's organization but also within it. Suspicion, violence,and self-destruction reign at its very heart" (p. 61).

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