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Introduction:
Mari Fitzduff, Executive Director of INCORE, shares the results of her research on people's motives to join paramilitary organizations. She suggests that one very common motive is the desire for power.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Paramilitary Research
Mari Fitzduff
Professor and Director of the MA Conflict and Coexistence Programme at Brandeis
University
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My own personal work showed that there was three reasons people became
paramilitaries.
One was mother's milk stuff. It was in the family. That would be very much
the Adams and McGuinness. They could not have been republicans, given the
context and the people they were.
The second was very much an intervention with the local security forces or
their folk being blown up by the IRA. All of these interventions often spawned a
reaction, which actually of course increased the number of people who were
prepared to use violence.
The third one was very much the male thing, particularly among the loyalists.
Sort of the need for meaning, particularly for disenfranchised, unempowered
young men.
One of the interesting pieces of research we're doing at the moment is
showing that in Algeria the war was mostly the young men who leaned against the
walls. The need to be heroic that is around for all young men can either go one
way or another in a conflict, and often if they're dis-empowered,
disenfranchised, the idea of the gun as power is something that is so attractive
to them.
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