Writing the Sixties into Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland into the Sixties

The overarching purpose of the special section as a whole is to move away from parochial perspectives by studying the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement within an international context and by drawing upon theoretical and methodological approaches that have been developed by Sixties scholars to study experiences elsewhere. It is our intention that this exchange should be a two-way process – that Northern Ireland and the global Sixties should be put into dialogue with each other. As the two have generally been regarded as unrelated, this introductory essay has more work to do than a conventional introduction. It lays the foundations for the dialogue by setting out the story of Northern Ireland’s Sixties and how it fits into established narratives of the global Sixties. Northern Ireland has echoes of other experiences without being a mere echo of any of them. This is explored in the next part of the introductory essay, which also sketches out what placing Northern Ireland in its broader context adds to our understanding of the global Sixties. The introductory essay then examines how and why the existing literature has stuck to a much more insular reading of the civil rights era. The global and the local threads are then weaved together to offer a primer on post-war Northern Irish history, touching on both structural and subjective processes. This background sets up the essays that follow. The conclusion to the introduction outlines how they develop the dialogue and provides a set of concluding remarks on where research remains to be done on the topic of the special section.