Would Barack Obama be sitting in the White House today if Rosa Parks had not refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery more than fifty years ago? While protesting is not only a matter of getting the “seats”—even if some activists seem to think so—without doubt it has its consequences.1 It is difficult to consider the election of the first African-American president of the United States without thinking of the interrelated political, cultural and biographical impacts of the mobilizations of the 1960s, and in particular the civil rights movement and the aggregate-level changes it has led to in the last half century. As Frances Fox Piven has recently written (2009), a constellation of very different factors were at play in Obama’s victory (the failures of the Bush administration, the war on terrorism and especially the situation in Iraq, the economic crisis, and so forth), “[b]ut even all that would not have been enough to elect an African American as President of the United States if not for the accomplishments of the movements of the 1960s” (74). Piven then substantiates her argument by stressing how black and youth voters were determinant in Obama’s election. She relates this directly to “the passage of the Voting Rights Act [1965]… …[which] answered black demands for the right to vote and for representation as well”; and “the 26^th amendment to the constitution [which in 1971] gave the 18 – to 20-years-olds who were at heart of [the 1960s mobilization] the right to vote” (75). What is most interesting for this article is a later passage from Frances Fox Piven, which provides an apt starting point for discussing how different movement outcomes can affect each other in the short and long term.

There is another way in which I think the Sixties movements played a role in the historic 2008 election. The Sixties movements were the spurs for the transformation of American culture, including changes in ideas and norms about sex, gender and the family, for example. … … In the end, the Obama victory also showed that the so-called backlash to the Sixties movements was not all that was going on. In 2008 we learned that generations of people who had grown up in the cultural milieu generated by the Sixties movements, perhaps especially the popular culture of rappers and hip hop and African American sports heroes, had become if not immune at least more or less indifferent to racist appeals. (75-76)

Social movement outcomes, whether political, cultural or biographical, have been, thus far, compartmentalized into specific sub-fields within the literature on social movements and contentious politics.2 As Marco Giugni has suggested, “very little research has been done to show how a certain type of impact can help to bring about another type” (2004a: 31). By proceeding in this way, academic works have left the multiple levels of social change unconnected although they are in reality interrelated, influencing each other mutually and iteratively through long-term processes of social change. By contrast, social movement activists fully understand the relationship between different sorts of outcomes and move accordingly when choosing strategies and goals (Bernstein 2003).

Social movement impacts are not narrow paths leading from movement goals to success or failure (Bosi, Giugni and Uba 2016). Thus, we need to broaden our view of the interrelated effects of social movement outcomes, beyond their black-and-white borders, to embrace a far wider range of possibilities through which collective action affects social change, and we also need to look beyond short-term consequences to long-term changes (Sztompka 1995). A political, cultural or biographical impact may have a bearing on another type of impact, and an early consequence of such impact can give a significant boost to future broader social changes. Sometimes, however, the interrelated effects of social movement outcomes may be indirect, and delayed, even occurring well past the end of the cycle of contention that initially sparked the protest. Social movements that do not appear to be achieving their explicitly stated goals at policy level in the short term can, for example, achieve cultural effects or biographical impacts that may be fundamental to subsequent political changes, although these effects might not be visible for years. A clear example of this is the election of President Obama that was mentioned above. Here, the cultural changes prompted by the Sixties movement, and the civil rights movement in particular, had a long-term effect at a political level and contributed to the election of the first African-American president of the United States in the new millennium. On the other hand, immediate achievements may well disappear, become irrelevant in view of long-term developments, or ultimately even reverse and produce a backlash. Mobilizations not only lead to positive effects, but they can clearly do worse than failing to achieve their initial goals.

Drawing on the existing contentious literature on politics, which has not explicitly recognized the agenda of interrelated effects, the first section identifies six hypothetical processes of social change through which social movement outcomes may mutually affect each other: political→cultural, political→biographical, cultural→political, cultural→biographical, biographical →political, and biographical→cultural. Empirically, through a process-tracing approach focusing on the political→biographical process of social change, I will investigate how the British State’s responses (policy outcomes) toward the disruptive mobilization of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland and to the armed campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (henceforth, PIRA) have reshaped the context in which Republican politics were conducted, through voluntary and community activism for community regeneration, thus influencing the post-movement life of PIRA volunteers (biographical outcome). This empirical part draws on secondary sources and semi-structured interviews of former rank-and-file members of the PIRA. Between 2007 and 2008, I conducted 25 open-ended semi-structured interviews with rank-and-file members of the PIRA who were, at the time of my fieldwork, associated with Coiste na n-Iarchimí. This is an umbrella organization working for the social, economic and emotional wellbeing of current and former Republican prisoners and their families. A full description of the empirical material is available in Bosi (2012, Forthcoming). The final section of the article discusses the significance, implications and possible limitations of the interrelated effects agenda, identifying new opportunities for empirical investigations to guide future research.

In writings on the outcomes of social movement activities, whether short-term or long-term, there have been references to the modifications at political, cultural and biographical levels and whether these are intended or unintended goals for the social movement (Giugni and Bosi 2011; Bosi and Uba 2009). Political outcomes relate to those effects of movement activities that alter a movement’s political environment in some way (Amenta et al. 2010). Cultural outcomes refer to changes in the attitudes, social norms and behaviors of the operating political actors (Earl 2004). Biographical outcomes refer to the impact of mobilization on the lives of participants in social movements (Giugni 2004b), as well as to the impacts on the life patterns of those targeted by social movements.3 Since these three types are not independent, despite the majority of the literature mistakenly treating them as such, I now turn to a discussion of six hypothetical processes via which a certain type of impact may help to bring about another type of impact (Figure 1). These hypothetical processes are by no means exhaustive, nor are they intended to demarcate inevitable sequences. Rather, they are components of the social change process that may occur following social movement protest. In certain cases, some processes may be missing, occur to different degrees, be mixed in varied combinations with other processes, or reverse and produce backlashes. In trying to transcend the single-outcome approach and embrace a broader perspective that provides insights into the role of contention for social change, we accept that an impact on one particular level can become a source of change at another.

At the end of the 1960s, political contention emerged in Northern Ireland over the demands of the civil rights movement (henceforth, CRM) to end the social and political exclusion of the Catholic community in the region (Purdie 1990). The Unionist establishment and the Loyalist counter-movement resisted such demands with harsh state repression and open, violent confrontation (DeFazio 2013). This socio-political crisis in the region opened up a space: first, for extreme communal violence during the summer of 1969, when many nationalists were burned out of their houses; second, for the British deployment of the army into the streets of Northern Ireland to restore law and order; third, for the emergence of the PIRA at the end of 1969, as an answer to Loyalist mobs and to the deterioration in relations between the British Army and the Catholic residents in the working-class neighborhoods (Bosi 2011). From 1971 the PIRA military campaign, aiming for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and its unification with the Irish Republic, incorporated strategies such as bombings and armed attacks on security forces (from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), soldiers, commercial premises, militants from competing Republican armed groups, Loyalist paramilitaries, and civilians. The PIRA was the most violent actor in the Northern Ireland conflict (1969-1998), which also involved other Republican armed groups, Loyalist paramilitary groups, the Northern Ireland local police forces and the British Army.

The disruptiveness of the social protest at the first stage, and of the PIRA armed campaign afterwards, forced Westminster to intervene on ever-increasing occasions in Northern Ireland (disruptive mechanism) (Bosi 2016). Where initially it had put pressure on the Unionist establishment to concede a set of policy reforms to answer the Catholic mobilization, since it feared that the civil rights issue would damage its international legitimacy as the world’s first liberal democracy, with the explosion of communal violence and the emergence of the PIRA armed campaign, it took progressively more and more direct initiative in the region, so as to re-establish its hegemonic control in there (Bosi 2016). In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers killed 14 and wounded many Catholics at a demonstration in Derry, Westminster suspended the Stormont regime and introduced direct rule from London. The British state then complemented, with unequal discontinuous balance, counter-insurgency measures (Neumann 2003) with urban, social and economic development policy initiatives that were aimed at placating the mobilization of the Catholic community, at undermining support for the PIRA armed campaign in Catholic working class areas, and sought to stimulate Catholic participation in regional institutions. Its assumption was that once “British standards” were implemented in Northern Ireland by promoting public policies (Darby and Williamson 1978; Breen 2000; Osborne 2003), this would break the marginalization of the Catholic community and consequently they would be able to tackle the structural grievances that were seen as underpinning the violent conflict (Bean 2007; Whiting 2013).

Deprived Catholic working-class areas became, even during the neo-liberal years of Thatcher’s government, of central interest for the British state, which started to implement Keynesian policies, from housing and planning to education and employment (output responsiveness mechanism). Catholic civil society in general, and the voluntary and community organizations more specifically, became increasingly subsidized, in terms of funding and resources. Through this combination of counter-insurgency measures with public policies the British state reshaped the context in which Republican politics were conducted in the following years and decades (Bosi forthcoming).

Confronted by heavy repression, the PIRA by the mid-1970s had reoriented itself at military level to a cell structure and at social and political level to some degree toward community development, with a view to maintaining a significant presence in the Catholic working-class areas (Darby 1986; Kevlihan 2013). However, in the early 1980s these “community organizations and political structures that had started out as agencies of revolutionary mobilization became [with the British socio-economy development policies] gatekeepers between the state and the nationalist community, as well as acting transmission belts for the Provisional movement” (Bean 2007: 6). This was an unintended outcome of the social and economic changes produced by British policies, but on the other hand this outcome suited the British interest in using the Provisionals as partners in the peace process and interlocutors who could assure the future stability of the new negotiated settlement (cooptation mechanism). Thus, when the British state progressively regained its power in the Catholic community in the ghetto areas, such power had to be shared with the PIRA, given its brokerage capacity between nationalist working-class areas and the British state.

Although far from publicly disregarding their former strategies, by the mid-1980s both the leadership of the PIRA and the British establishment came to realize that a military solution was not the winning option for either side (Bosi 2013). The majority of PIRA volunteers6 had been integrated into the institutional political process through a peace process that resulted in a new negotiated settlement in which the PIRA decided to take part together with the other political forces present in the Northern Ireland conflict (the British and Irish states and Northern Irish political parties). On August 31, 1994, the Provisional IRA announced a complete cessation of military activity allowing Sinn Féin, its political arm, to sit at the “peace talks in the following years, which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement of April 12, 1998. As part of the Good Friday Agreement, reintegration programs for political prisoners were established, including training for former political prisoners, advocacy work, restorative justice projects, self-help initiatives, and youth and community work. PIRA volunteers refused to adopt the government agencies and other government-sponsored organizations and chose to use the welfare groups established by the PIRA in many areas throughout Northern Ireland (Shirlow and McEvoy 2008; Dweyer and Maruna 2011), which were, however, subsidized by the British state.

The post-armed activists, whom I have met during my fieldwork, all say that in the last ten years or more they have experienced high rates of participation in day-to-day issues of distributional politics at local level (such as: interface work, youth work, reintegration to society efforts following incarceration; conflict transformation initiatives, community based anti-poverty and anti-racism work, truth recovery, developing sporting activities, participating in alternative Irish schools, not-for-profit employment, encouraging and managing funding proposals). Their involvement in the Republican movement, first as armed activists and then as political prisoners, has transformed most of the lives of my interviewees. One of them said: “I see my current occupation as a community worker with young people in my community as a continuation of my involvement in the Republican struggle” (Interview no. 15). By working within neighborhood community centers, which accommodate the social needs of local residents in areas with Catholic communities, they show that the political consciousness gained over more than thirty years of struggle within the Republican movement continues to motivate their full-time activism in the post-Agreement era. They exhibit a sense of obligation that in their words was similar to what brought them into the armed group at the beginning (Bosi 2012; Bosi and O’Dochartaigh 2016). As Interviewee no. 19 said:

“There is no question that the involvement in the Republican movement had an impact on me personally. I would not have been the person I am not being part of the movement. I would not have done what I am doing nowadays, [working in conflict transformation activities]”

Although they were involved in the armed struggle, my interviewees suggested that they have gained empowerment and agency (Bosi and O’Dochartaigh 2016). In the post-armed conflict situation they were not ready to leave what they had gained and they had the opportunity to carry this forward. Working in the neighborhood community centers has been viewed by my interviewees as a protraction of their involvement in the Republican struggle. They see their occupations nowadays as another form of participation while still feeling “helpful” and “determinant” for their own community McEvoy and Shirlow 2009). These centers are seen to provide the transformative space to address the specific issues which impact their local communities and the broader Catholic community. Interviewee 20 pointed out: “I am nowadays a community worker, not affiliated with any political party. I am looking for investments in my community. I fight against poverty in my community” (Interview no. 20). The post-armed activists’ involvement in community centers has fostered in most former armed activists social and political dispensation. Thus, where previously in the early stage such positions were taken with the awareness of the British involvement, but with the willingness to use these as possible resources in their struggles, in a later phase community activism has developed as a career path that has allowed some of my respondents to become central figures in their own communities and progressively disengage from political violence repertoires. Those former volunteers whom I have met indicate that the individual’s empowerment within armed conflicts can be successfully carried over into post-conflict situations.

Scholars who have investigated biographical outcomes of social movements have noticed that, after their ‘career’, activists continue to espouse political attitudes close to those they embraced during their mobilization (Giugni 2004b), to show high levels of socio-political commitment and to pursue different lifestyles (jobs and structure of families) in concert with their beliefs. As such, the “standard interpretation” is valuable in understanding that social movement activism is important in post-movement lives. However, it tends to pay no attention to how states shape the social and political contexts within which activists conduct their lives. Thus, while the social movements’ experience is likely to mold the former activists’ post-movement lives, it is also true that the socio-political context plays a key role here. At an empirical level, this article’s reading of the biographical outcomes of PIRA volunteers complements existing works on social movements’ activists; but it also adds to it by demonstrating the mechanical effects of social change, how the British State’s public policies reshaped the context in which Republican politics were conducted, through voluntary and community activism for community regeneration, and the nature of the change these policies caused, rather than assuming that post-movement life was the consequence of militant activism and the end point in itself.

Social movement scholars have until now spent most of their time trying to understand how social change causes social movements. In this article, I have reversed the causal order of the relationship and focused on how social movements generate broad processes of social change. In particular, I have recommended that an approach which looks at the interrelated effects of social movement outcomes provides a useful research strategy and offers a number of distinct advantages. Firstly, it identifies new opportunities for empirical investigations, allowing scholars to ask questions they might not otherwise ask, to identify social processes in possible explanations that would not otherwise be seen, and to find answers that would not otherwise be found were an outcome studied alone or separately. Secondly, it shifts away from the search for those invariant causal features that favor movement impacts toward a more dynamic analysis of the processes, leading to the interrelated effects of social movement outcomes by stating that social change is attained via various trajectory processes. Thirdly, it facilitates investigations that move beyond short-term impacts to long-term outcome processes and to the continuity of the challenger’s legacy over time, thus setting the chronological dimension firmly back in social movement research. Fourthly, it allows us to recognize the complexity and multidimensionality of social change to a greater extent. One further and final advantage of this framework is that it provides a central opportunity for shifting the focus from single-outcome analysis—focusing on the narrow paths leading from social movement mobilization to success or failure—to broader processes of social change, which go beyond achieving goals, and also considers indirect and unintended outcomes that flow from movement activities.

This article is by no means exhaustive, and there is clearly much that can and should be done to substantiate this approach: e.g., using further empirical data to support and extend the arguments made, and possibly finding other potential trajectory processes and then, piece-by-piece, assembling formal hypotheses and rigorously testing them. In this sense, I do not suggest that the trajectories I have suggested here are the only ones; nor do I suggest that they are always present. The fact that we know that this is a worthy area of study, however, remains illustrative. What needs to be determined accurately is how interrelated effects are likely to take place. We must ask more complex questions about the extent and operation of interrelated effects of social movement outcomes. For example, under what conditions will each hypothetical trajectory process work? What are the limits of these hypothetical trajectory processes; that is, under what conditions do they fail to occur or are they reversed? Are there some which occur more often than others? Is the typology of a movement, right wing or left wing for example, a determinant for certain trajectories instead of others? How should we methodologically study such trajectories? When can an observed social change still be said to be a result of a trajectory process initiated by a social movement long since ended? What further research needs to be carried out in relation to the interrelated effects of social movement outcomes? The fair answer is that we do not know, and cannot know, until systematic empirical research is designed specifically to address these questions. At this early stage, this article underlines the lack of previous research on the interrelated effects of social movements, but does not purport to offer any definitive solutions. Most of the premises it offers are speculative and require extensive empirical scrutiny to ascertain their theoretical validity and consistency. The potential trajectory processes elaborated here may lead future research on the interrelated effects of social movements in more promising directions if such research is systematically conducted via a historical-sociological study that comparatively examines different movements over an extended period of time in one or more countries.