Hezbollah, the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Intersection of Militant and Political Identities

Next up in the series of posts on the Dietrich College Honors Fellowship summer presentations is Chloe Thompson, a global studies and Hispanic Studies double major with a creative writing minor.

When she applied for the fellowship program, Thompson wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do her thesis on, but she knew that it would involve non-state groups and political actors. She settled on Hezbollah, Arabic for “Party of God,” and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) because they’re two non-state actors that have separate but active militant and political arms.

Thompson described how she spent the summer looking for answers to questions such as why the PIRA transformed from a militant group to a political one and how Hezbollah maintains having both factions function.

“The great thing about this fellowship was that I didn’t need to produce something right now,” Thompson said. “I could take the time to understand and learn.”

She feels that she now has developed a mastery of the concepts, a depth of knowledge and the vocabulary to analyze and talk about both groups.

“Now, I’m at a jumping off point for figuring out what I want to say,” she said.

Thompson’s most immediate plan to tackle the next stage of her project is to keep looking for ways Hezbollah and the PIRA are similar.

Learn more about her project.

View a group photo of all of the honors fellows before their presentations.

Final Countdown

Behold! 10 whole pages. Only 10 more to go.

Hello there, everyone!

So I am entering the final stretch of my summer thesis work, and, truth be told, I’m a little wiped out. This upcoming week is about to remind me of the meaning of “hell week” – I have my final presentation and my twenty-page thesis first draft due Monday, and a test or a project due every day Tuesday – Friday for my other summer classes. On the upside, my thesis work is progressing nicely, and I have 10 pages typed up, and will be able to complete the next 10 by Monday without too much trouble. Though this weekend may be one long stare into the the white glare of my computer screen, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m fortified with snacks and caffeinated beverages and seven-hour study playlists, and this thesis will bow to my will.

My chemically questionable motivator/reward system. I don’t know what: ‘You could win summer’s awesomest party’ means, and I’ve already thrown out the wrapper, so we’re going to have to live in ignorance.

I’m also in the process of planning for my final presentation for Monday. I think of all the Fellows, my project is definitely the most traditional. While the other lovely and brilliant ladies in the program are designing their own studies, producing creative works in various storytelling mediums, and creating new areas of investigation all together, I’m pretty much writing one giant paper about a topic that I think is fascinating. I am not at all trying to knock my work – I think my project focuses on an area that absolutely merits further study and analysis, and is pretty cool in its own right. But while my peers will walk in on Monday and explain their processes in creating their innovative methodologies in their projects, I will be more focused on what I’ve learned and what I plan to say with the knowledge that I’ve gained.

The only problem with that is that it’s taken me two months to develop the vocabulary and the understanding that I have now, and even so, I feel that I don’t have full mastery of either of these two very complex groups. I think you could study either Hezbollah and the IRA for years and still be surprised by them on occasion. And beside that looming learning curve, I believe it will take me at least another semester to fully articulate what exactly I want to say with the ideas that I have absorbed.

So on Monday, I need to walk into a room with twenty plus people, all of whom will be staring at me, and articulate some complex and difficult ideas in ten minutes. And though I have on occasion demonstrated wit, I have yet to mastery the brevity bit that lies at its core. It’s hard for me to keep my accounts of even my simpler opinions to ten minutes, so keeping two months of academic crash-courses down to that and no more will be a pretty trick. But such is life. Part of the reason I started this project in the first place is because I wanted to learn how to explain the complex and difficult-to-understand parts of the world and its foreign policy to people who don’t necessarily have a profound personal interest in those subjects. A key component of explaining anything well is being able to do it quickly and clearly. So, this is good practice.

But to get to the practicing part, I need to finish the writing part. To that end, I’m off. Have a lovely weekend!

Oh, the weather outside’s delightful… And I have more thesis left to do. Go enjoy it for me!

Learn more about my project.

Outline done – onto the first draft

Hey there, everyone!

My thesis outline is DONE.

Pictured above: my outline of my outline, in all of its flowchart and commentary-laden glory

Which I am really, really excited about. And I am about to start actually writing my thesis – my first draft, at least – which is a little surreal, to be honest. It feels really good to have a direction I’m set on and moving in. So let’s talk about where that direction is.

In my thesis, I’m attempting to answer a few simple questions. Why the IRA was able to successful transition from strictly a militant group to a political organization? And: How was Hezbollah able to maintain a dual identity as a militant group and political organization? I’m trying to stick to these deceptively simple questions as much as I can. As a researcher, I have a terrible habit of trying to push my evidence perhaps farther than I should, for example, asking myself questions like: What does that tell us about Westphalian nation-states? It’s not that this isn’t a good or important question to ask; it very much is. Through this project, I’m learning that it’s really helpful to keep your questions tight and grounded in evidence. When you have a vast world of source materials, it’s really easy to get lost.

Here’s a simplified version of the historical chain I’m going to be discussing: The IRA developed as a group dedicated to the

Pictured here, some of the evidence it’s so easy to get lost in.

defense of Irish Catholics from a very pro-British and pro-Protestant government. Armed struggle was always a massively influential part of their ideology. However, in the late 1960s, the British began jailing members of the IRA as criminals, which led them to aggressively campaign for the label of prisoners of war, mostly through prison-wide hunger strikes. The IRA wanted a political label, and had to allow for political action in order to obtain that label. However, in the post-prison years, the IRA returned to violence and force as its primary means of action. This willingness to use force led to a precipitous drop in the average Irish person’s support of the organization. The loss in publicity led the IRA to continue political action once again.

This loss of public support is a fascinating factor in the IRA’s decision to pursue political action. It was far from the only reason it eventually transitioned away from militant action, but it was key. When the group used force and violence, people in Ireland lost faith in it and the cause, which limited the objectives that the group could achieve. In short, violence cost them political capital.

Hezbollah, on the other hand, does not lose political capital with their Lebanese constituency through violence, usually because they direct most of their violence toward Israel. The group formed in 1982 to defend southern Lebanon against the Israeli occupation. Iran and Syria offered the group enormous amounts of logistical and tactical support, which served to encourage the radicalization of Hezbollah’s ideologies. After the occupation ended, Hezbollah rebuilt damaged infrastructure and gained community support through social services. In 1992, Hezbollah won 12 parliamentary seats in the Lebanese government. When Israel invaded Lebanon again in 2006, the group managed to hold them off for a few weeks, which was a major victory in the eyes of the Arab world. This victory won Hezbollah legitimacy in the eyes of all Lebanese, not just their traditional Shi’a supporters. In short, Hezbollah obtained political power by balancing military might and social services.

The chain of historical events that led to both of these groups’ shifting identities is complex and rich. I’m so excited to really sink my teeth into both of these stories over the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

Learn more about my project.

Let’s Talk About the Word “Craic”

Hey there, everyone!

This week has been a little crazy for me. In addition to my thesis work, I just started taking two summer classes, one of which is charmingly entitled Physics for Future Presidents. I’ve been trying to stay ahead of my new classwork, and keep to my proposed schedule with my thesis materials. Luckily, I’ve been able to spend time working with some of the other Dietrich Scholars – Lucy Pei and Kaylyn Kim – to help keep myself focused.

This is Kaylyn. You should go take a look at her project! When you’re done reading my blog post, that is.

This week I started digging my teeth into my IRA sources, and changing tact in this manner has been enormously helpful. When I was only looking at Hezbollah sources, it could be difficult for me to determine which organizational aspects were important, and which ideological threads would be comparable between the two wildly different groups. One of the trends that caught at my attention was the idea of conferring and obtaining legitimacy when one is attempting to lead a militant organization.

With that in mind, let’s talk about the word “craic.”

“Craic,” usually used with the definite article, is a uniquely Irish term for news and gossip, entertainment and fun. “What’s the craic?” is basically a colloquial Irish version of: “What’s up?” The word is actually based on the early English word crack, which was used in England in the same context in the late 1800s. However, as the term died out in England but remained prominent in Ireland, people started spelling it as if it were an Irish word.

(Bear in mind, I learned all this in a tour of Dublin when I was studying abroad last semester.)

Wherever it comes from, “the craic” is now a very uniquely Irish concept. It’s even on T-shirts.

(This is my Dublin souvenir t-shirt. The craic was indeed mighty.)

While putting a word on a t-shirt doesn’t necessarily indicate a wider cultural trend, I did hear the word when I was in Dublin, and even if it’s more of a tourist gimmick, the combination of English-Irish heritage of the word is really interesting. It’s English in origin and even in its traditional spelling, but now doesn’t even exist there anymore.

For groups like the IRA, legitimacy is of paramount importance. One of their basic justifications for their existence is the idea that the British government imposed partition upon the people of Ireland, and given that that separation between the north and south of Ireland was both imposed by a foreign government and undesired by the Irish, that makes that action doubly invalid. In the IRA’s own eyes, they represent the true will of the Irish people.

All this makes me think that legitimacy is a tricky topic. Having English roots doesn’t make craic any less Irish. While I don’t think that the IRA represented the will of the Irish people as a whole, they absolutely represented grievances that many Irish people felt quite strongly. Both of these instances make me wonder how and why legitimacy gets conferred. How did the term craic survive in Ireland while fading away in the land of its birth? How does a group know – or argue, I suppose – that it represents the true will of an entire nation?

One of the profoundly fascinating things about non-state actors is that they can change and challenge the way we think about non-state actors. We often assume (Western) states are legitimate because they’re simply there. We don’t necessarily think about if they should have the power they do, and if so, why. Legitimacy doesn’t simply emerge from some governmental void; it must be created, and then continually considered and discussed. It must be regarded, to some degree, as the construct that it is.

Learn more about my project.

Side-by-Side View

My name is Chloe Thompson and I’m about to be a senior at Carnegie Mellon University. I’m still a bit shocked and very delighted to have received the Dietrich College Honors Fellowship for this upcoming year. I’m thrilled to be able to sink myself fully into my research, to devote all of my mental energy to untangling the complex issue that I’m going to pursue.

My thesis is a comparison between the Lebanese terrorist group/political party Hezbollah and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Hezbollah holds 12 seats in the Lebanese Parliament, but is still an active militant group, which is an interesting and very unique confluence of identities. The PIRA was a militant group, but now is only a political party. That’s a more normal or intuitive development, insofar as violent militant groups have normal developments. I want to compare the two and see what looking at them side-by-side shows me.

Violent non-state actors have always interested me, but I’ve always had trouble fully understanding them. I’ve never experienced that level of desperation or that level of political rage. And even when I contemplate that depth of feeling, the practical expression of such opinions still eludes me. How are violent attacks and political movements be coordinated from the grassroots level? How are those acts planned and hidden at the same time? And once a violent state actor is established, what encourages those people to lay down their arms and become part of the system they passionately protested?

Non-state actors and how they interact with states are hardly easy to understand. Both Hezbollah and the PIRA were born from unique circumstances and oppressions, and then grew into complex organizations. But I get to spend the summer chewing them over and seeing what I learn.

Read more about my project.