Definitional Importance and the PD/SDS

It's interesting that this week's theme deals with something I just attended an inter-disciplinary conference about. Last weekend I was at Oxford with a grouping of historians, sociologists, and philosophers discussing the current state of research around terrorism and radicalization. And I apologize in advance, as what follows is more a breakdown of the scholarly interest in terrorism and an historical sociological look at the current field.

Something that is not often discussed enough is the inter-disciplinary relationships inherent to conceptualizations of terrorism. Historical work often utilizes words like "militant", "radical", "radicalization", "extremism", and "terrorism" in uncritical ways.

Interestingly, scholarly conceptions of 'radicalization' weren't extremely prominent in the literature until the early 2000's (usually cited as 2003, but often dated back to 2001). This is not to say historians and social movement scholars weren't interested in it before: Stephen Beach's article on the People's Democracy and its 'radicalization' is important enough that Linen Hall Library in Belfast maintains a physical printout within their Political Collection. Still, it's a hotly contested phenomenon in social movement theory, and many writers avoid the terminology because of its implicit normative judgment and fuzzy definition.

Terrorism is both intricately related to our understanding of 'radicalization' and just as hotly contested. A general sense of terrorism being something which 'we know it when we see it' is useful enough in popular histories or recounting of events, but the lack of definitional scholarship has meant that we are often at odds when utilizing such a specific word to present a totalitizing concept. It's interesting to point out that this post posits 'fear' as a semi-central tenet to what makes terrorism, terrorism. But it is not entirely clear to social movement scholars that fear or terror (oddly enough) is required for acts of extremism to be 'terrorism'. We're not even entirely clear on what the central tenets are, or if central tenets exist: there's always a fear that terrorism could be an 'essentially contested' subject which lacks an agreeable, actionable definition.

My case study of the People's Democracy (Northern Ireland) in contextual comparison to the ideological development of the Students for a Democratic Society (USA) has run up against this issue several times. The PD 'radicalized', if we understand radicalization to be a temporal process that can affect dispositional attitudes and not just behavioral ones, during the August riots of 1969. They cohered around a militant revolutionary socialist line that October and subsequently adopted a serious-minded anti-imperialist critique that changed their dispositional stance toward the Protestant working class. They developed a minor armed wing for self-defense, and initiated contact with the burgeoning Provisional IRA in hopes of forming an anti-imperial alliance. This alliance bore fruit in the early 1970's with the formation of the Northern Resistance Movement, the PD's participation within which drove away many moderate allies. The PD failed to decry the violence of the PIRA, especially during Bloody Friday.

By contrast (or comparison), the SDS faced institutional pressures from domestic security forces and internal arguments over physical militancy. By 1969 a contingent within the organization known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement would itself bisect, with one instantiation later becoming the violent Weather Underground. This split was also down to differing understandings of imperialism and third-world nationalism (thus the original confrontation between RYM and the growing Popular Labor tendency within SDS) and then around differences in praxis/understanding of working class relationships across racial lines (between RYM and RYMII).

The scholarship rarely, if ever, refers to the PD as terrorists, and I'm sympathetic to that general reluctance. The PIRA are quite often described that way, which taken at face value may seem fair, but there's more nuance to it than brief overviews can delineate. To return to the question of whether 'fear' is a requirement for terrorism: would the PIRA car-bombing a checkpoint to facilitate movement across the border be an act of terrorism? It likely wasn't meant to cause 'fear', as specifically understood in most definitions (though this is arguable). Is cooperation with a group that utilizes violence against civilians enough to contextualize other armed action as being in service of 'terror'? Because if so, what do we make of the PD who was largely anti-violent outside of defensive posturing, but who utilized their political savvy to both influence and promote Provisional anti-imperialist ideology? Though the PD attempted to promote non-sectarian leftism, their participation in Radio Free Belfast during the violence of August 1969 saw the broadcasting of music one might view as communally related or nationalistic: does the promotion of these sentiments, though clearly devoid of direct physical harm, also instill fear in the other community? I'm not so sure that it does, or that it's more complicated than that: but one can see how these questions arise, while also drawing out our concerns over what radicalization as a process even entails.

Similarly, the SDS is almost never called terroristic while Weatherman is. But it's another example where the progression to violence isn't as clear cut as one would expect. A lot of the literature focuses on a language of 'guilt' that being the central deficit within certain members of SDS that led them to more 'active' participation in the anti-imperial and anti-racist struggle. But with regards to Weatherman especially, our dicussion of their radicalization often takes an extremely normative tone.

This language around 'radicalization' within the PD and SDS is rampant and both are often essentialized as 'radical movements' by 1969. Their cooperation - or evolution/devolution into - armed resistance movements requires careful consideration of our definitions to better understand the processes and outcomes these groups embodied. I'm happy to discuss either group more, their domestic relationships to other militant movements, or to each other, as well as the broader questions on definitional/procedural issues within the field.

For general reading on the PD:

Arthur, Paul. The People’s Democracy 1968-1973. Belfast: Blackstaff Press Limited, 1974.

Beach, Stephen W. "Social Movement Radicalization: The Case of the People's Democracy in Northern Ireland." The Sociological Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1977): 305-18. Accessed April 11, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4105836.

Bosi, Lorenzo, and Gianluca De Fazio. "Contextualizing the Troubles: Investigating Deeply Divided Societies through Social Movements Research," in The Troubles in Northern Ireland and Theories of Social Movements. Bosi Lorenzo and De Fazio Gianluca eds. Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, 2017.

Collins, Matthew. “The History of People’s Democracy: Civil Rights, Socialism, and the Struggle Against the Northern Irish State, 1968-1983,” PhD diss. Ulster University, 2018.

Prince, Simon. Northern Ireland's '68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.

For SDS

Barber, David. A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.

Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2004.

For General Reading on Radicalization and Terrorism Across Contexts:

Cassam, Quassim. Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis. London: Routledge, 2021.

Bosi, Lorenzo, Charles Demetriou, and Stefan Malthaner, eds. Dynamics of Political Violence: A Process-Oriented Perspective on Radicalization and the Escalation of Political Conflict. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

Richards, Anthony. "Defining Terrorism," in The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism. Andrew Silke, ed. London: Routledge, 2018.

Don't know if questions are permitted as well as answers, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Who was the first person on record to use the term "terrorist(s)," and who were they referring to?