Military strategy and medievalist practice in the 1981 Irish hunger strike
Published: 12 February 2024
Thursday 22 February 2024
War Studies Research Seminar (held jointly with Medieval History)
Thursday 22 February 2024
at 4.00 pm
Dr Francesca Petrizzo (University of Glasgow)
"Triumphs of failure"? Military strategy and medievalist practice in the 1981 Irish hunger strike’
How does one win (or lose) a hunger strike? This paper examines the question from the case study of the 1981 hunger strike held in Northern Ireland by members of Irish republican paramilitary groups for political status in prison. Querying philosopher Richard Kearney’s contention that Irish republican strategy has been historically founded on the ‘triumph of failure’ of repeated doomed enterprises, the paper analyses the hunger strike as a product of complex military strategy despite its apparently non-violent means, calculated to appeal, but also unselfconsciously enacted, within the practice of religious and poetic medievalism of the community of the hunger strikers, successfully rallying together a community previously divided on the strikers’ organisations. Bringing together textual, material, and iconographical analysis, the paper aims to reframe and complicate the narrative of what death on hunger strike can mean for the strikers’ political aims, and their community’s perception.
First published: 12 February 2024