change, some blow [cannabis], and a blue movie!” The young man was fortunate his offense was so slight—he could have suffered far worse. At the time, republicans had executed several people condemned as drug dealers under the cover name “Direct Action Against Drug Dealers” (DAAD). Tommy had been frustrated by the practice of punishment attacks for many years. In the early 1980s, a teenager asked him to arrange for an ambulance behind a local recreation center at a specific time because he was scheduled to be shot in the knees and feared bleeding to death.32
In the weeks after the Agreement was ratified in May, I met another man outraged by punishment attacks. “Billy” was an affable loyalist, aligned with the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), yet he seemed more interested in fishing than politics. When compatriots shot his brother in the knees, however, he became distraught. His brother’s offense had been to oppose UVF decommissioning after the GFA was ratified. A man in the area had recently lost both legs after a punishment attack, and Billy feared that his brother would as well. As he wept, he repeatedly lamented the fact that his brother was shot by his own friends.
Republicans have long treated the practice of punishment attacks as an assertion of the right to police their own neighborhoods, a popular sovereignty of sorts. Because many nationalist residents regarded the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), now the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), as an illegitimate police force, investigations of petty crimes were often impossible, due to a lack of local cooperation. Yet without a police service, people were vulnerable to crime. Thus, punishment attacks were viewed by many nationalists of west Belfast as an unfortunate necessity (Hamill 2011).
Loyalists, caught in a bind of loyalty to the state, argued that the police were lax about investigating “ordinary” crimes and treated their communities as ghettoes. All paramilitary groups at the time engaged in the practice of beating and even shooting those accused of antisocial behavior—usually young men, who, although undoubtedly disruptive, came of age in profoundly traumatic circumstances. In the years following the ceasefires, while official paramilitary operations against enemies diminished, punishment attacks rose (see Kennedy 2001; Hamill 2011).33 Government tolerance of such attacks during the GFA’s implementation demonstrated how the realpolitik of conflict resolution clashes with the ideals of both human rights law and discourse. But it also illustrates more profound contradictions created by human rights discourse as it was incorporated within the peace processes.
From the 1970s to the present, punishment attacks have been a feature of life for the people who experienced the highest levels of violence during the conflict. After the ceasefires, punishment attacks sustained legitimacy for armed groups. In the absence of pursuing their military raison d’être, armed groups asserted their authority and relevance through the practice. Indeed, for a brief period in the mid-1990s, when local political parties envisioned a possible settlement in an expansive fashion, some paramilitaries believed they would become part of a new postsettlement policing service. Later, attacks were linked to policing dissent, as Billy came to realize. More recently, republican dissidents have taken up the practice to build legitimacy for their position, engaging in high-profile attacks in parts of west Belfast and Derry.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the media increasingly covered the ongoing punishment attacks. In a communicative culture where caustic wit is highly valued, their persistence during the ceasefires was a source for black humor. In 1996, novelists Robert McLiam Wilson and Glenn Patterson took grim aim at the ceasefires’ conceits with a documentary called “Baseball in Irish History” for Channel 4’s War Cries series.34 Noting a dramatic surge in baseball bat sales since the ceasefires, despite Northern Ireland having only one baseball team, Wilson went to darkly comic lengths to underscore ongoing violence. On camera, he went to a sports shop and bought a bat, making it clear to the clerk he would not be playing baseball. He went to the Sinn Féin office in the Falls Road area of west Belfast to inquire about joining the local baseball team. (Of course, there was no baseball team in the area.) In both everyday consciousness and media coverage, punishment attacks undermined rather than sustained the legitimacy of key actors in the peace process—the combatants themselves.
The practice of punishment attacks in the post-ceasefire and post-settlement periods in Northern Ireland underscores the vulnerabilities that human rights discourse introduces vis-à-vis past and present violence. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was convinced of paramilitaries’ commitment to human rights when they began to organize restorative justice projects during the late 1990s.35 One young research participant who had unpleasant encounters with paramilitaries explained to me that it was difficult to listen seriously to talk of rights for victims of petty crime—after all, paramilitaries used to walk around his estate with baseball bats, not to mention their more violent activities during the conflict. Contradictions between human rights discourse and behavior are not new, of course. The U.S. struggle for independence, with its appeals to liberty, was won in part by slave owners. Such contradictions obviously undermine the credibility of human rights advocates. Local social and historical contexts, as well as the historical uses of rights discourse, determine the degree of skepticism that greets such discourse just as much as the intent of human rights advocates.
More importantly than the problem of disingenuousness, however, the attacks, the political culture they reproduce, and the vulnerability of working-class communities to both petty criminality and paramilitary authority underscore larger problems within the new narrative about human rights and peace. Extralegal attacks by armed, nonstate actors highlight the extent to which the agreement left in place the structures and practices of paramilitarism and a capacity for violence in neighborhoods where an economic peace dividend remains elusive. The new culture of human rights has limits that require acknowledgment.
Punishment attacks undermine the rhetoric of peace, and pose broader questions about the nature of the peace and who actually experiences it. Answers to these questions, in turn, show that human rights proponents have taken different approaches to political violence, contributing to skepticism rather than society-wide attachment to its principles. Claims about the efficacy of human rights within the peace process do not fully acknowledge the contradictory effects of such advocacy. In short, as both a legal and normative framework to describe or address political violence in Northern Ireland, the political effect of human rights also produces legitimacy for a minimal, profoundly differentiated statist “peace.” This quasi-peace and its skeptics are influenced by the GFA’s approach to human rights, the way human rights principles have been translated in rights talk, and particular characteristics of the context of reception.
Human rights laws concern the actions and obligations of states. Paramilitary organizations and transnational corporations do not sign human rights treaties. However distant a given state’s authority may be from the daily lives of putative citizens, legally a state is responsible for violations that occur within its jurisdiction.36 The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was, as Alston (2005) puts it, so concerned with state sovereignty that its assumptions are not adaptable to changing conditions in which states are “competing with quite a few others as the embodiment of power and even authority” (4). Occasionally, McCorquodale (2010) writes, treaty-monitoring bodies like the UN Committee Against Torture attempt to define nonstate actors as “sufficiently ‘state-like’” to merit the status of violators, but, to do so, they must use “a form of legalized imagination” (107–8). Multiple claims against the British state for violations of the European Convention have been successful during the conflict, such as Ireland v. UK.37
However, nonstate actors inflicted the majority of casualties in Northern Ireland, which is unusual for a regional conflict. Recognizing this stark fact is crucial for understanding how rights talk can undermine public confidence in both human rights institutions and the broader peace process. McKeown (2009 [2001]) attributes 2,013 fatalities to republican paramilitaries (55.71 percent), 1,018 to loyalists (28.02 percent), and 378 to security forces (10.46 percent) in the period 1969–2001 (14).38 McKittrick et al. (1999) attribute 2,139 deaths to republican paramilitaries (58.8 percent), 1,050 to loyalists (28.9 percent), and 367 to security forces (10.1 percent) between 1966 and 1999 (1482).39 Sutton’s (1994) earlier analysis yields similar proportions. Of course, positivism cannot convey or contain the subjective experience of violence (Ross 2002; Wilson 2003).