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In 1973, the Ulster Unionist Party fragmented after fifty years as the dominant party within Northern Ireland. However, this fragmentation did not simply occur in reaction to the events of the 1960's and early 1970's. It was a long ongoing process that can be traced back to the 1940's and 1950's. This study is concerned with the splintering of the Ulster Unionist Party and the reasons that lay behind the division. The first contention in this thesis is that the Ulster Unionist Party was never the single united political party that it was often supposed to have been. It was a localized party designed to organize a localized State; supported by a cross-class alliance of voters; thus reflecting the inherent divisions and contradictions that this type of party inherently must contain. In fact, the leadership have always had to work hard to maintain unity and therefore political dominance. The only issue all Unionists were agreed upon.was the Constitutional one i.e. Northern Ireland was to remain an integral part of the United Kingdon. This leads to the central point of the thesis; which is that the fragmentation of the Ulster Unionists is not merely the result of the current "troubles" in Northern Ireland. It is argued here that the root causes of the division of the Ulster Unionist Party are located in the Socio-economic changes that occupied in Northern Ireland in the post-World War II era. The Ulster Unionist Party as the defender of the interests of local capital and Protestant supremacy increasingly found itself at odds with much of its support. Northern Ireland was integrated into the wider international market economy with the demise of the traditional local industries such as shipbuilding, textiles, and agriculture. The Unionist government was forced to play a greater role in the economy of the state, introducing economic planning and centralization. This meant the Ulster Unionist Party at the local level lost its room to manoever and increasingly lots of its power. This was compounded with the introduction of the Westminster controlled Welfare State, which integrated the Catholics into the Northern Irish State, as least at the economic level. The Ulster Unionist Party as the defender of local bourgeois interests and Protestant Supremacy increasingly found itself acting as an agent for international capital and the integration of Catholics into the economic Sphere of the State. However, the Ulster Unionist Party tried to do it in such a way so not to threaten the political power of the Protestants, thus maintaining a "Protestant State for a Protestant people". Increasingly this caused problems. Many Unionists at the local level were becoming alienated with the Unionist government at Storemont. At the same time most Catholics were not really getting all the economic benefits they had hoped for, while at the political level, they were still discriminated against. As a result the Civil Rights Movement arose. The Ulster Unionist Party was unable to cope with the Civil Rights demands partly because it feared alienating any further the support of hard-line and local Protestants and partly because the party was not organized to allow full Catholic particiaption in the political life of the State. One of its main functions was to ensure that Catholics did not threated Protestant Supremacy. It is in this period of the 1960's and early 1970's that the inherent divisions of a cross-class party finally became apparent. The Ulster Unionist Party finally did break-up over the political issues of law and order, Direct Role and power-sharing. But these political divisions cannot be seen in a vacuum. The Socio-economic conditions of Northern Ireland had changed, without corresponding political changes. Greater Catholic integration into the Northern Irish State at the economic and Social level, demanded greater political integration. The Ulster Unionist Party adapted to the Socio-economic change as best it could without trying to change the basic political nature of the State, but it was not enough. When Socio-economic change occurs there must be corresponding political change. The Ulster Unionist Party could not act as an agent for this change, as it was not designed to. When the British government intervened to act as the agent of change the Ulster Unionist Party lost its raison d' etre, causing a realignment in Unionist politics. The party had little choicebut to fragment and adapt to the new political situation in Northern Ireland.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the study of revolution. Spurred by events like the 2011 uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, the rise of Islamic State, and the emergence of populism, a new age of revolution has generated considerable interest. Yet, even as empirical studies of revolutions are thriving, there has been a stall in theories of revolution. Anatomies of Revolution offers a novel account of how revolutions begin, unfold and end. By combining insights from international relations, sociology, and global history, it outlines the benefits of a 'global historical sociology' of revolutionary change, one in which international processes take centre stage. Featuring a wide range of cases from across modern world history, this is a comprehensive account of one of the world's most important processes. It will interest students and scholars studying revolutions, political conflict and contentious politics in sociology, politics and international relations.

Review of 'Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century: The New Waves of Revolutions, and the Causes and Effects of Disrup-tive Political Change'. Edited by Jack A. Goldstone, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev. Springer, 2022. ISBN 978-3-030-86467-5.This is a big book in more ways than one. In its 41 chapters, readers will find much to keep them occupied. The volume's range is vast, covering several hundred years of history and an equally expan-sive geography, offering grand theorising alongside granular analysis, and providing insights ranging from the descriptive to the predictive. Within this panorama, I would highlight four general themes that strike me as particularly significant: first, the book's focus on waves; second, its insistence on the back-and-forth between history and theo-ry; third, its global frame of reference; and fourth, its attentiveness to non-progressive revolutionary currents, most notably religious revolutionary forces.

Forty years after its publication, Theda Skocpol's States and social revolutions remains the pre-eminent book in the study of revolutions. But how should the book be assessed from the vantage point of contemporary world politics? This essay reviews Skocpol's contribution to three main issue-areas: theory, structural approaches and the international. It argues that, rich as it has been, the research agenda initiated by States and social revolutions has run its course. It cannot respond effectively to the different contexts within which revolutions emerge and the diverse forms they take. Its bifurcation between structure and agency cannot capture the relational character of revolutionary action. And, despite its concern for the international components of revolutions, States and social revolutions cannot accommodate the ways in which revolutions are 'intersocial' all the way down. A new Skocpol is needed for a new age of revolutions.

AbstractThis article examines the historical sociology that informs Andrew Linklater'sViolence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. On the sociological side, it critically assesses Linklater's use of Elias and Wight, arguing that his 'higher level synthesis' is internally incompatible. On the historical side, the article argues that the occlusion of the transnational interactions that, in great measure, drive historical development means that Linklater's analysis is inadequate for its stated purpose: to chart the development of civilising processes within the Western state-systems.

This article combines insights from the literature on revolutions with that on nonviolent protest in order to assess the causes and outcomes of the Arab uprisings. The article makes three main arguments: first, international dynamics were the precipitant cause of the Arab uprisings; second, because the region's "neopatrimonial" regimes were particularly vulnerable to shifts in state-military relations, the hold of elites over state coercive apparatuses played a decisive role in determining the outcomes of the revolutions; and third, the organizational character of the protest movements, including their use of information and communication technologies, helped to raise levels of participation, but limited their capacity to engender major transformations. Of particular interest to scholarship on nonviolent movements, this article demonstrates the ways that, as the revolutionary wave spread around North Africa and the Middle East, protestors in states outside the original onset of the crisis overstated the possibilities of revolutionary success. At the same time, regimes learned quickly how to demobilize their opponents. The lesson is clear: the timing of when movements emerged was just as important as their organizational coherence and levels of participation.

On one level, history is used by all parts of the International Relations (IR) discipline. But lurking beneath the surface of IR's approach to history lies a well-entrenched binary. Whereas mainstream positions use history as a means to fill in their theoretical frames (seeing history as a kind of 'scripture' of abstract lessons), many post-positivists reduce history to a pick-and-mix of contingent hiccups (a 'butterfly' of what-ifs and maybes). Interestingly enough, this binary is one reproduced throughout the social sciences. As such, there is a bigger story to the apparently 'eternal divide' between history and social science than first meets the eye. This article uses the various ways in which history is used -- and abused -- in IR to probe more deeply into the relationship between history and social science as a whole. This exploration reveals four frameworks, two drawn from history (context and narrative) and two drawn from social science (eventfulness and ideal-typification) which illustrate the necessary co-implication of the two enterprises. The article employs these tools as a means of re-imagining the relationship between history and social science (including IR), conceiving this as a single intellectual journey in which both are permanently in view. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]