Human Rights as War by Other Means - Jennifer Curtis Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

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understandably reluctant to expose themselves to further state violence. As the conflict escalated, NICRA turned to more conventional advocacy, lobbying the UN regarding internment, policing and justice, and treatment of prisoners.8 The PD became overtly associated with republicans as it attempted to become a working-class movement. After conflict became endemic in 1969, some PD members aligned themselves figuratively and literally with the beleaguered residents of the Falls. Arthur (1974) recalls that attempts at activism in working-class communities fell on deaf ears among the Protestant working class, who associated civil rights with nationalism. Certainly, PD efforts in west Belfast never became as influential as citizen’s defense committees and paramilitaries. But PD did introduce New Left concepts, such as people’s cooperatives and people’s councils.

      Many individuals within PD became influential figures in political and academic spheres in the years that followed. Kevin Boyle became a widely respected human rights lawyer. Michael Farrell, also a human rights lawyer, served on the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Eamonn McCann, a young leftist from Derry, became a respected journalist and an active member of the Socialist Workers Party. Bernadette Devlin, famously elected an MP at age twenty-one in 1969, was influential in the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). Jeff Dudgeon pursued a successful challenge to sodomy law before the European Court of Human Rights and remains an internationally recognized gay rights activist. Paul Bew became a respected academic historian and eventually advised the Ulster Unionist Party during the peace process.

      Although consensus about the nature of the Stormont regime eventually emerged, the role of the civil rights movement in the conflict is more contentious. Unlike Bell (2006), who treats the movement as part of a trajectory toward human rights values, others implicate activists in the genesis of conflict. For example, Prince (2006, 2007) suggests that the civil rights movement, shaped by the “global revolt” of 1968, was partially responsible for the violence that followed its rise. Because civil rights brought street politics to sectarian Northern Ireland, with the ensuing state brutality and intercommunal violence, Prince argues that “its legacy was more one of civil strife than of civil liberties” (2006: 875). Politicians also claim that civil rights demands inevitably led to conflict. Conor Cruise O’Brien, who careened between unionism and republicanism in his long political career, argued in 1981 that the movement’s outcome “in Northern Ireland conditions could only be, as usual, Catholics versus Protestants” (cited in Ranelagh 1999: 268).

      Other scholars and participants view the movement as a catalyst rather than a cause of conflict, treating violence as a symptom of an irredeemable system, unmasked by the movement. White (1989, 1993) explores how membership in or support of the civil rights movement influenced some to join the IRA. It is overly simplistic, however, to treat the movement as a straightforward route to armed struggle or as a direct cause of the conflict. Furthermore, a number of factors determined west Belfast community activists’ subsequent appropriation of civil rights tactics, especially direct protest and rhetorical appeals.

      Although large numbers of civil rights activists did not embrace violence, the fact that some high-profile activists eschewed the nonviolence of Martin Luther King was a crucial factor in perceptions of the civil rights movement as a cause of the conflict. The role of the republican Wolfe Tone Societies in NICRA’s formation and the presence of paramilitary stewards at some marches led many to believe the movement was aligned with republicanism. Certainly, some of my research participants embraced both the civil rights movement and a philosophy of armed struggle. Furthermore, after conflict erupted, some more radical tendencies in the broader movement advocated armed struggle, and individual activists such as McCann appeared sympathetic to PIRA at times (1980: 129).9 Nevertheless, the mobilization for civil rights, through the assertion of basic rights to assembly, did not inevitably cause the conflict. It was, however, a catalyst for some of what followed. One consequence was that the language of rights became an integral part of institutional and everyday politics.

      The contemporary function of rights discourse as war by other means is determined by how rights talk is received by different social groups as much as by the intentions of advocates. Current reception of rights talk is partly shaped by historical perceptions that, despite legitimate grievances, the civil rights movement was implicated in the conflict. Prominent campaigners’ contradictory positions about political violence aggravated these perceptions. However, the contemporary politics of rights discourse are shaped even more by the way working-class activists swiftly appropriated rights talk. In territorialized communities where the violence of the conflict was most intense, the example of the civil rights movement provided rationales, tactics, and language for claiming basic social and economic rights. The community politics of rights that followed were contingent rather than inevitable: they were shaped by historical political conditions, structural changes linked to deindustrialization, the intentions of the activists, and the very particular concerns and fears of people living through extreme violence with scarce material resources. In this crucible of poverty and violence, rights talk became inseparable from ethnopolitical conflict.

       “Beyond the Capacity of Maps”: Poverty, Violence, and Political Consciousness

      So it came about that, by 1970, a first-class housing crisis was one of the principal contributory factors to the Troubles.

      —C. E. B. Brett, Housing a Divided Community, 36

      During pervasive intercommunal violence in 1969 and 1970, riots, direct violence, and intimidation displaced thousands of people from their homes. The upheaval intensified profound associations of people and place, leaving behind a cityscape that was “beyond the capacity of maps.”10 In the aftermath, west Belfast residents retreated behind protective barricades into the safety of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. The destruction of houses and displacement of people created additional demands for housing in areas of the city where housing supply was limited and substandard. The Stormont government had been slow to introduce the postwar welfare entitlements established in Britain, and public housing was scarce. As part of the 1960s reforms, local government devised redevelopment plans that would increase public housing in the western part of the city. However, the plans were primarily designed to attract foreign investors as traditional industries declined. To provide new factory and commercial sites, the plans proposed razing and redeveloping large swathes of Victorian housing and moving people to newly constructed public housing. This process was already underway when conflict erupted.

      As conflict brought additional threats to working-class life in the city, wide-scale resistance was mobilized against redevelopment. Increased housing demand and new resentments animated this resistance, as well as fear. Angry residents combined the direct action and rhetorical appeals of the civil rights movement with neighborhood defense groups, emerging paramilitarism, and desperate self-help projects. Rights-based consciousness and language converged with violent upheaval and preexisting grievances about housing. This new, community-based activism brought rights politics into the everyday terrain of loss and survival. Although these new housing campaigns made valid claims on the state, under conditions of increasing violence and territorialization, housing rights activism appropriated rights talk to maintain or rebuild communally identified neighborhoods. These embattled communities effectively became collective subjects of rights, establishing an important antecedent of present rights politics.

      This new activism translated grand claims for civil rights and rights to national self-determination, often intermingled, into more quotidian assertions of residents’ rights to determine the location and design of public housing. Such claims were what Sally Merry (2006a) calls a “vernacularization” of human rights. Merry argues that such discursive processes offer liberatory possibilities when advocates “draw more extensively on local institutions, knowledge, idioms, and practices” (48; see also Merry 2006b). Merry (2006a, b) also asserts that local social movements become translators in the process of vernacularizing rights, and this dynamic also emerged in Northern Ireland.

      In 1970s west Belfast, new NGOs proliferated, creating an infrastructure of local self-help and advocacy groups. Activists and scholars of the period called the emerging NGO practices “community action” (Lovett and Percival 1978; Griffiths 1975a). These new community groups translated struggles for neighborhood survival into the language of rights; housing rights became a central

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