Irish Republican Counterpublic

Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland in Galway, and an Adjunct Professor in International Relations at Webster University, Vienna. He is the author of Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners shaped the Peace Process in Ireland (2022) and Performing Memory: Corporeality, Visuality, and Mobility after 1968, co-edited with Luisa Passerini (2023).Anne Kane retired as Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Houston Downtown, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Her book, Constructing Irish Nationalist Identity: Ritual and Discourse during the Land War, 1879–1882, was published in 2011.

"Scholars still know relatively little about the communities of support that stand behind the more visible face of movement activism. In this fascinating volume, the authors show that Northern Irish Republicans’ thirty-year struggle for independence was sustained by a 'counterpublic' forged in tenants associations, prison protests, local broadsheets, street art, and mothers’ support committees. Deeply researched and elegantly argued, the volume provides a genuinely new perspective on the ideas and institutions that fuel movements." -Francesca Polletta, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine"Organizing its detailed, highly innovative empirical investigations around concepts of counterpublic and civil sphere, this volume makes a critical theoretical intervention. Its publication is a major event, not only for studies of Irish Republican resistance but for social movement studies more broadly." -Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University

• 1. Introduction: Social Movements and Counterpublics: the Northern Irish Republican Movement, 1969-1998 2. The Northern Ireland Republican Movement and Counterpublic Construction, 1969-1976 3. Irish Republican Counterpublics and Media Activism since the Troubles 4. Troubled Mothers: The Mobilization of Republican Motherhood during the Northern Ireland Conflict 5. The Republican Counterpublic in the H-Blocks, 1983-1989 6. The Prisoners' Support Campaign: How Hunger Strikes Facilitated the Counterpublic 7. Commentary