The Dynamics of Social Movement Development: Northern Ireland's Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

This article extends our understanding of social movement development through a qualitative longitudinal analysis of Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement during the 1960s. It applies Diani’s (1996) approach that links categories of master frames with political opportunity structures. The analysis chronicles how political context shaped the evolution of the moveSment’s dominant message and traces how political opportunities imparted advantages to a reformist civil rights message that reflected a realignment master frame in early stages of Northern Irish mobilization. Later, changes in political context—police repression, lack of political responsiveness, and countermobilization—rendered reformist political realignments impossible and gave advantages to elements in the civil rights network that stressed the traditional ethnonational divisions and revanchist, antipartitionist messages. Specifically, this article asks how the inclusive and reformist mobilizing messages of the 1960s Northern Irish civil rights movement came about and then reverted to the exclusivist Nationalist message of the 1970s, and how the shifting political opportunities brought about these changes.