| Summary: | <p>In a roughly two-year period between 2016–2018, three organisations within the wider Anti-Agreement Irish Republican Movement (AARM)—a cohort bound by opposition to the 1998 Northern Irish Peace Process—claim to have shifted their predominant method of achieving organisational objectives to community activism: the deliberate employment of non-violent activities targeted at communities in the areas they are operational within. It is a significant change within a grouping which has been most studied for its use of state-directed violence as a method of "spoiling" the post-conflict political status quo.</p>
<p>Two main questions emerge from this shift which has wider implications for the study of violence-utilising contentious actors: What are the mechanisms of strategic change, and what are the processes which explain the selection of strategic replacement? In other words: why do groups change, and how?</p>
<p>This research employed a comparative case study approach, and used data drawn from interviews with 83 participants from seven months of fieldwork on both sides of the Irish border. Findings suggest that strategic change is being driven by shared perceptions of organisational and wider movement decline, with community activism deemed not only to be an adaptive response to reversing these perceptions and achieving core commonly held objectives in what they understand as an altered operating environment, but one which fits within a wider collective identity of anti-Agreement Irish republicanism.</p>
<p>These findings, in what is a unique case study of a relatively recent process of significant strategic change among a cohort of post-conflict spoiler groups, offers contributions to how clandestine organisations understand and navigate (including at an intra-organisational level) organisational maladaptation to their environments. In the process, it offers salient contributions to understandings of strategic action within both "radical" organisations, and social movement organisations more broadly.</p>
|
|---|