Pax Brittania: British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969-1982

British forces have conducted operations short of war in Northern Ireland for twenty-five years. Counterinsurgency, developed as a countermeasure against the IRA and since disseminated worldwide, constitutes a cultural system. Counterinsurgency contributes to the cultural permanence of violence in Ulster. Internal, structural factors in security policy and military doctrine contribute to the longevity of conflict between the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and the British Army. The reverence of military competence by cultures of violence, and the conservation of violence by military organizations, help sustain protracted conflict. Geo-strategic compression within a cordon sanitaire allows for the exchange and circulation of military violence. Quirks in domestic and international law sustain rather than diminish violence. While entrenched emergency laws judicially normalized conflict, the laws of war, by making intensity a requirement of belligerent status, created the preconditions for stability.;Republican resistance culminated in the 1981 hungerstrikes, which by spectacularizing death, invoking an atavistic moral justice, and using the silence of the body to incriminate the state, 'embodied' a resistance to counterinsurgency. The hungerstrikes, as an explicitly military operation, asserted a political mandate and legitimated a physical force tradition in Republican thought.;Finally, the persistent humanization of death in low-intensity conflict is examined, especially how 'point blank' violence problematizes military subjectivity and the expression of compassion for soldiers.;The circulation of military techniques between state forces and paramilitaries, within terrorist and counter-terrorist networks, forms an autonomous, self-regulating military order. Military strategy depends on 'knowing' the enemy, yet counterinsurgency promotes cultural constructions of the enemy which may involve ethnocentric vilification. Military paradigms, while sometimes reflective of actual conditions, often persist despite incontrovertible failure. Because counterinsurgency emphasizes the human factor and local knowledge, tactical countermeasures include information control, and the imitation by special forces of non-hierarchical networks of paramilitaries. Infrastructural factors encourage covert intelligence agencies to self-organize, and to develop normative combatant codes with their opponents.