The year 1968 witnessed a global revolt against imperialism, capitalism, and bureaucracy. It was not – as has long been claimed – the start of a cultural revolution that produced greater personal freedom, but the end of the post-war attempt to define a new left. This reinterpretation of '68 as a global revolt rather than the the baby-boom generation's coming-of-age party is based upon recent research at the local level. An examination of Ireland's radical left during the ‘long '68’ is an important contribution to this work, as it was significant as well as small. Contact at congresses and through the media with other leftists enabled Northern Ireland's ‘sixty-eighters’ to conceive of themselves as part of an imagined community of global revolt. They shared similar goals and tactics. Like their comrades on the continent and across the Atlantic, the region's sixty-eighters tried to attract attention and support by provoking the authorities into an overreaction. In a country dominated by the sectarian divide, however, clashes between Catholic protesters and Protestant police officers were always more likely to lead to communal conflict than class struggle. The Troubles is perhaps the most tragic outcome of the interaction of global and local politics that occurred during '68.

The study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy, led not only to conflicts but also to some of those conflicts becoming violent. Focusing on Belfast in the summer and autumn of 1969, this article sets out how the main political actors asserted competing claims to popular sovereignty and traces how multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts became arrayed around the central one.

Northern Ireland after October 1968 rapidly descended into civil war. Local conflicts were of central importance in this turn to violence. By looking at the civil rights movement and then at Belfast Republicanism, this article argues that fragmentation and competition created incentives for groups and individuals to adopt violent strategies. Both the overarching conflict and the myriad local conflicts which were linked to it shaped how the early Troubles developed.

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