One hundred years ago, Easter 1916, Irish revolutionaries rose against the British Empire proclaiming a Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. The men and women of the Easter Rising were defeated by the overwhelming force of the British Army, in five days of intense fighting. Their leaders were executed. But the Easter Rising lit a fire that ended with the whole country turning against Westminster’s rule, and founding a nation. But today, the heirs to the Irish state are embarrassed about 1916. They are ashamed that their state owes its origins to a revolution. Along with academics and other commentators in the press and on television they dismiss the Rising as the work of violent fanatics, and the defeat of constitutional politics. Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? explains why today’s Dublin elite are recoiling from the origins of their state in a popular struggle. Where the critics paint the Rising as an armed conspiracy, we explain that it was in fact a revolt against war; not a militaristic upsurge, but the first challenge to the awful slaughter of the First World War. The Statesmen of Europe sacrificed millions upon the altar of war. Their recruiting sergeants in Ireland, Edward Carson and John Redmond sent 200,000 Irishmen into the slaughter and nearly 50,000 were killed. The Easter Rising drew a halt to British recruitment, and the blow to the Empire was the first crack in a growing revolt against the war, followed by the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the German revolution the following year – which ended the conflict. The Easter Rising was an inspiration to those who were challenging the Empires of Europe, from India to Vietnam, from New Zealand to Moscow; it was an inspiration to British activists like John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst; and it was an inspiration to the Irish men and women who rose up against British rule to free their nation.

On Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, the seven members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s military council met to proclaim an Irish Republic with themselves as the provisional government. After a week of fighting with the British army on the streets of Dublin, the Seven were arrested, court-martialled and executed. Cutting through the layers of veneration that have seen them regarded unquestioningly as heroes and martyrs by many, Ruth Dudley Edwards provides shrewd yet sensitive portraits of Ireland’s founding fathers. She explores how an incongruous group, which included a communist, visionary Catholic poets and a tobacconist, joined together to initiate an armed rebellion that changed the course of Irish history. Brilliant, thought-provoking and captivatingly told, The Seven challenges us to see past the myths and consider the true character and legacy of the Easter Rising.

This edited volume examines a range of historical and contemporary episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation in the aftermath of war. Reconciliation is a concept that resists easy definition. At the same time, it is almost invariably invoked as a goal of post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and transitional justice. This book examines the considerable ambiguity and controversy surrounding the term and, crucially, asks what has reconciliation entailed historically? What can we learn from past episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation? Taken together, the chapters in this volume adopt an interdisciplinary approach, focused on the question of how reconciliation has been enacted, performed and understood in particular historical episodes, and how that might contribute to our understanding of the concept and its practice. Rather than seek a universal definition, the book focuses on what makes each case of reconciliation unique, and highlights the specificity of reconciliation in individual contexts. This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, conflict resolution, human rights, history and International Relations.

This book examines the well-covered subject of leadership from a unique perspective: history's vast catalogue of leadership successes and failures. Through a collection of highly compelling case studies spanning two millennia, it looks beyond the classic leadership parable of men in military or political crises and shows that successful leadership cannot be reduced to simplistic formulae. Written by experts in the field and based on rigorous research, each case provides a rich and compelling account that is accessible to a wide audience, from students to managers. Rather than serving as a vehicle for advancing a particular theory of leadership, each case invites readers to reflect, debate and extract their own insights.

Considered by many Ireland's most important revolutionary, James Connolly devoted his life to struggles against exploitation, oppression, and imperialism. Active in workers' movements in the United States, Scotland , and Ireland, Connolly was a peerless organizer, sharp polemicist, and highly original thinker. His positions on the relationship between national liberation and socialism, revolution in colonized in colonized and under developed economies, and women's liberation in particular were often decades ahead of their time. This collection seeks to return Connolly to his proper place in Irish and global history, and to inspire activists, students, and those interested in history today with his vision of an Ireland and world free from militarism, injustice, and deprivation.

Once assumed to be a driver or even cause of conflict, commemoration during Ireland's Decade of Centenaries came to occupy a central place in peacebuilding efforts. The inclusive and cross-communal reorientation of commemoration, particularly of the First World War, has been widely heralded as signifying new forms of reconciliation and a greater "maturity" in relationships between Ireland and the UK and between Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland. In this study, Jonathan Evershed interrogates the particular and implicitly political claims about the nature of history, memory, and commemoration that define and sustain these assertions, and explores some of the hidden and countervailing transcripts that underwrite and disrupt them. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Belfast, Evershed explores Ulster Loyalist commemoration of the Battle of the Somme, its conflicted politics, and its confrontation with official commemorative discourse and practice during the Decade of Centenaries. He investigates how and why the myriad social, political, cultural, and economic changes that have defined postconflict Northern Ireland have been experienced by Loyalists as a culture war, and how commemoration is the means by which they confront and challenge the perceived erosion of their identity. He reveals the ways in which this brings Loyalists into conflict not only with the politics of Irish Nationalism, but with the "peacebuilding" state and, crucially, with each other. He demonstrates how commemoration works to reproduce the intracommunal conflicts that it claims to have overcome and interrogates its nuanced (and perhaps counterintuitive) function in conflict transformation.

This book employs a history of ideas approach to trace the complex journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and its afterlives. Although the RCP existed for barely two decades, it left a curiously lasting impact on British politics, and its legacies have provoked bewilderment, suspicion, and animosity. Formed as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1978, the RCP represented a distinct and often controversial offshoot of the Trotskyist left. Campaigning principally around 'unconditional support for Irish freedom' and anti-racism, RCP cadres expounded an independent revolutionary politics to supersede capitalism. In the 1990s, however, the RCP leadership ruefully declared that the working class had suffered an historic defeat, and the party dissolved in 1996. Combining wide-ranging archival research and twenty-four life-history interviews with former activists, Preparing for Power examines ideological continuity and change among the ex-RCP milieu. Explaining the party's key ideas, their evolution, and their retrospective contestation, Jack Hepworth analyses the RCP's trajectory in a broader political context. In doing so, Hepworth illuminates a network which has been the subject of considerable media sensation and polemical attention.