Explaining the intractability of the Irish civil war

While there have been numerous accounts of the origins of the Irish civil war less attention has been paid to the intractability of the conflict and why, in particular, it did not reach a negotiated conclusion. This articles documents the efforts made to bring the fighting to the end, and illustrates the process of political polarisation that took place among the Irish political elite after June 1922. It concludes that the nature of the issues underlying the conflict were the primary reason why the conflict proved so intractable. That these proved so intractable suggests that the traditional interpretation of the Irish Civil War, as a conflict fought between two essentially compatible variants of Irish nationalism, ought to be revised

Elite · Interpretation (philosophy · Irish · Irish nationalism · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy

• Decommissioning as an issue in the Irish Civil War

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• Voluntarist democratic theory and the origins of the Irish civil war

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