Papers by Rosa Gilbert
Recent scholarship on civil disobedience in Northern Ireland primarily focuses on the immediate p... more Recent scholarship on civil disobedience in Northern Ireland primarily focuses on the immediate period before the breakout of violence in 1969, and in some cases, on the mass protests of the late 1970s around the H-Block/Armagh prison protests. This paper attempts to fill the gap between these two periods in its analysis of the rent and rates strike of the early 1970s, which was initiated in response to the re-introduction of internment without trial. In doing so, it positions itself against simplistic approaches towards civil disobedience as either oppositional, or causally linked, to armed struggle. Instead, it probes the complexity of its relationship to armed struggle in relation to the Northern Irish and British state's security policies.
This paper is a study of the blanket and no-wash protests in the Maze/Long Kesh and Armagh prison... more This paper is a study of the blanket and no-wash protests in the Maze/Long Kesh and Armagh prisons, undertaken by Irish republican prisoners from the 1st March 1976 until the end of the hunger strike in October 1981. Using Michel Foucault’s work on liberal governmentality and biopolitics, it frames the protests in terms of the power relationship between the British government and the republican prisoners, engaging with the debate over who was responsible for the protests and their escalation. In doing so it covers three key areas: the criminalisation policy, how the protests were deeply linked to this policy but also resisted it, and the use of language and imagery by both sides in framing the protests. This contributes towards the argument that the prison protests represent a microcosm of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and became the battleground through which the British government and republican movement invested their ideological positions. The use of oral history and governmental records assists this aim of understanding the ideological and pragmatic standpoints, the state’s motivations of the criminalisation policy and the prisoners’ motivations in resisting. It contends that the complexity of the power relationships which endowed the prisoners with participation in their criminalisation meant that their resistance was not simply against the criminalisation policy but against the control to categorise and limit action by the British government. As such the struggle in the prisons was over more than special category or political status: it was a metaconflict over the framing of the conflict and a resistance to British involvement in Ireland.
Edited Journals by Rosa Gilbert
Resistance in Modern Ireland, Jun 16, 2017
Guest Editor of "Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish Studies", issue VII on "Resistance in Modern... more Guest Editor of "Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish Studies", issue VII on "Resistance in Modern Ireland" (Florence University Press) in June 2017.
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Papers by Rosa Gilbert
Edited Journals by Rosa Gilbert