Paramilitaries, Peace Processes and the Dilemma of Protection: The Ulster Defence Association's Role...

Paramilitaries, Peace Processes and theDilemma of Protection: The UlsterDefence Association’s Role in ‘Keeping aLid on Loyalism’

Audra Mitchell and Sara Templer

Paramilitary actors involved in peace processes are expected to contribute to two distinct forms ofprotection: national-level protection as ‘security’; and local-level security as ‘safety’. Examining thecase of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in Northern Ireland, we explain how these two formsof protection have become interlinked in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (GF/BA) and therelated peace process. Instead of generating a virtuous cycle, this has created a dilemma betweenproviding protection as ‘safety’ and as ‘security’. Drawing on interviews with key UDA-affiliatedactors in 2009–10, against the backdrop of increasing ‘dissident Republican’ violence, we assesshow they navigated this dilemma, and its potential effects on the unfolding political context, callingfor greater attention to the relationship between different conceptions of protection in peaceprocesses.

Keywords: Northern Ireland peace process; paramilitary actors; protection;Loyalism

One of the central claims of peace agreements and their associated peace processesis the ability to create a polity that can protect its citizens. For former paramilitaryactors involved in peace agreements and the peace processes that follow, however,different—and sometimes competing—conceptions of protection are at stake.Crucially, the form of protection as security demanded by framers and signatoriesof a peace agreement may differ qualitatively from the conception of protectionexpected at the local level. To appreciate this, we employ Zygmunt Bauman’s(2006) distinction between ‘safety’ and ‘security’. The latter, he claims, refers to thewidespread sense of confidence or assurance in the overall stability of a society(Bauman 2006, 134). We argue that this concept relates to the promise of national-level security made by peace agreements/processes and embodied in, for instance,the existence of stable ceasefires, effective and acceptable forms of policing and astate regarded as legitimate by the majority of citizens. Safety, Bauman claims,relates to the more localised, and even personalised, notion of shelter from, orexposure to, threats to one’s own person including: ‘security of ... bodies and theirextensions, homes and their contents, streets through which bodies move’ (Bauman2006, 138, emphasis in original). This, we suggest, describes the localised forms ofprotection that paramilitaries claim to provide to their communities, and upon whichthey base their claims to legitimacy. In Northern Ireland, examples of this includeparamilitary members usurping policing functions at a local level by disciplining

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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2011.00505.x BJPIR: 2012

© 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2012Political Studies Association

so-called ‘antisocial’ behaviour within their area of influence and, crucially, activelydissuading or combating rival paramilitary factions to prevent attacks.

A defining aspect of the involvement of paramilitary actors in peace negotiations isthe recognition that the form of localised safety they provide is incompatible with,or even mutually exclusive of, the kind of security sought through a peaceagreement/process. As such, paramilitary actors who engage formally with thepeace process are expected to relinquish their claims to provide localised protectionas safety to their local communities in exchange for the form of protection as securitypromised by the peace agreement. Simultaneously, we shall argue, they take on theadditional obligation of protecting the peace agreement/process itself, instead ofviewing themselves as responsible solely for their own communities.

This is the context in which Loyalist1 former paramilitaries have negotiated theirrole between the state and their local communities since the Good Friday/BelfastAgreement (GF/BA).2 From the beginning, we argue, they have faced an uphillbattle in convincing their organisations and many members of loyalist communitiesthat giving up protection in the form of local safety does not pose a significantthreat. Indeed, instead of presenting their involvement in the peace agreement/process as a trade-off between protection and safety, they have consistently pre-sented the situation as one in which the best means of securing safety is throughtheir own contribution to overall security. In other words, they have relied on theassumption that the demands for protection as safety and as security are comple-mentary and, under the peace agreement, effectively function as one and the samething. This may hold true in the period directly after the peace agreement is signed,in which formal ceasefires required to negotiate the peace agreement are fullyenforced, and thus the peace agreement appears to provide local safety by means ofnation-level security.

However, at times when there is evidence that the peace agreement/process is notcapable of guaranteeing local safety, the trade-off made by former paramilitaryactors becomes visible—and unacceptable—to their local communities. This gener-ates a conflict between the two forms of protection, and places former paramilitaryactors in a bind. In order to provide protection in the form of safety to theircommunities, they must ultimately undermine or even attack the peace agreement/process which they have been made responsible for protecting by (re)arming andassuming control within their local communities. Conversely, if they choose toprioritise the protection of the peace agreement/process, these actors are compelledto sacrifice, or at least compromise, the form of protection as safety that theircommunities demand. This, in turn, casts doubt on the function that they havetraditionally claimed to be constitutive of their organisations and social role, leadingto a diminution of their power and influence in local communities. This attenuationof authority simultaneously reduces their ability to control their own organisationsand local communities and hence to protect the peace process. As such, whatinitially appeared to be a situation of mutual benefit quickly descends into adilemma of protection, in which the two forms and subjects of protection becomemutually exclusive.

We examine this dilemma of protection through exploring the experiences offormer Loyalist paramilitary leaders affiliated to the Ulster Defence Association

2 AUDRA MITCHELL, SARA TEMPLER

© 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2012 Political Studies AssociationBJPIR, 2012

(UDA) who are currently involved in the Northern Ireland peace process. Thefindings discussed in this article are based on ethnographic research conducted bythe authors between 2007 and 2010, drawing upon a series of semi-structuredinterviews and group discussions (see endnotes). This fieldwork was conductedthrough repeated interviews (conducted at key junctures) with four key respon-dents who, at the time, were recognised publicly in Northern Ireland as beingassociated with the leadership of the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG)—thepolitical advisory body to the UDA—and the UDA itself. Specifically, we examinehow the recent intensification of attacks by ‘dissident Republicans’ has cast doubton the capacity of the peace agreement/process to provide both security and/orsafety for loyalist communities. Our respondents were chosen specifically becauseof the influence they have attained both as ‘community development actors’, in thecontext of the conflict transformation project embedded in the peace process (seeSpencer 2011), and as former Loyalist paramilitary actors. This means that ourrespondents effectively bridge the demands for protection as safety (through theirparamilitary roles) and for security (through their roles in delivering elements ofthe peace process). In exploring how they have negotiated this dual role, weexamine the dilemma of protection faced by paramilitary actors tasked with pro-tecting both the peace process in which they are involved and the communitiesfrom which they derive power.

Providing ‘Protection’: The Distinctive Identityof the UDAThe UDA is a legally proscribed Loyalist paramilitary organisation which maintainsa strong presence in certain loyalist communities in Northern Ireland. The claim ofprotecting and promoting community safety has been deeply embedded in itsnorms, discourses, organisational structures and activities throughout its history,particularly when the state or social institutions have appeared incapable of pro-viding conditions of overall security in which personal or local forms of safety seemguaranteed. In fact, as Lyndsey Harris (2011, 88–89, 95–97) iterates, this ethos ofprotecting the local community is the factor that the UDA has consistently used inthe attempt to distinguish itself from the other main Loyalist paramilitary organi-sation in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). This stems in largepart from the UDA’s roots in neighbourhood defence activities. Neil Southern(2011, 203) explains that the organisation emerged in 1971 as:

a direct consequence of the amalgamation of a number of local defenceassociations which felt that the protection of Protestant areas [from mili-tant republicans and the IRA] could not be entrusted to the forces of thestate.

As such, the UDA has consistently presented its role as a defensive one, claimingthat any violent action on its part could be justified as a reasonable response toviolence on the part of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in a context of what itperceived to be inadequate protection from the police and army. Whether or notthese claims can be justified is debatable; the UDA has, over the years, beenimplicated in blatantly sectarian and criminal violence (see, for example, Southern

‘KEEPING A LID ON LOYALISM’ 3


2011). Moreover, the veracity of the UDA’s claims to provide ‘protection’ has comeunder increasing scrutiny. Since the signing of the GF/BA, and particularly since thedecommissioning of the IRA in 2005 which marked the diminution of violence byProvisionals and other ‘mainstream’ republican paramilitary groups, the need forlocal-level safety has been called into question. In particular, as a result of theLoyalist ‘feuds’ of the early 2000s (see below), the public image of the UDA hasbecome increasingly one of involvement in criminal activity, internecine violenceand heavy-handed unofficial policing by the UDA of its own members and indi-viduals within communities in which it holds influence.

For our purposes, however, the key point is that the leadership of the UDA hastraditionally conceived its own role as one of providing protection as safety fromIRA attacks at an intensely localised level. This conception of acting as a localisedprotection authority is integral to the contemporary UDA, continuing into thepost-GF/BA era: distinct from the UVF, the UDA has never had a central command,but operates as six loosely connected brigade areas across Northern Ireland. Indeed,its focus on protecting local safety has, throughout its history, proved more consti-tutive of the organisation and its activities than even its broader political goal ofmaintaining Northern Ireland’s union with the UK (Harris 2011, 88).

Protecting the Community Post-GF/BAIn the past two years, our respondents have experienced a resurgence in demandsfor community-level protection as safety. This, we argue, has placed them in aposition in which safety and security come into conflict, and they may ultimatelyappear to be unable to provide either form of protection.

Since 2009, the ability of the peace agreement/process to ensure security bybinding its paramilitary participants to lasting ceasefires and the decommissioningof weapons has been significantly challenged, as a result of a perceived rise inviolence by ‘dissident Republicans’.3 Public attention towards ‘dissident’ violencerose sharply after the incidents at the Massereene Barracks in March 2009, inwhich two soldiers were shot and killed, followed 48 hours later by the murderof PSNI Constable Carroll. In the ensuing months, this was followed by a numberof attacks, threats, shootings and bombings, including highly publicised bombattacks on a courthouse in Newry and an MI5 base in county Down in March2010 (see Breen 2010). Against this backdrop, a number of violent incidents wereattributed to Loyalist paramilitaries, including the killing of a Catholic man, KevinMcDaid, by a (L)oyalist mob in Coleraine in May 2009, and a number of xeno-phobic attacks on foreign families living in neighbourhoods influenced by theUDA in South Belfast in 2009. Even more recently, in June 2011, there has beena resurgence of violence at the Short Strand interface in East Belfast that hasbeen accompanied by clear signs of dissent and fracturing within the UVF (BelfastTelegraph, 16 June 2011; BBC News, 21 June 2011). These incidents have gener-ated stronger pressure on our respondents to control their ‘communities’ in orderto fulfil their role in the peace process, but at a time when some members oftheir communities are demanding that the UDA should reprise its historical para-military role.



The peace process and new constitutional arrangements both outlaw and morallycondemn the acts of paramilitary organisations, yet they condone the role of formerparamilitary actors as leaders and conduits of power and information within their‘communities’, which is crucial to these actors fulfilling their role in the peace processas ‘community leaders’. At the same time, it is acknowledged that the basis of theseactors’ legitimacy within their own ‘communities’ derives largely from their role inparamilitary structures. In other words, the ability of former paramilitary actors toperform the role of ‘community leader’ is premised on their continuing ability toensure the safety of their local communities—in this case, literally referring to thesafety of persons, homes, property and local infrastructure. In order to attain thelegitimacy necessary to ‘represent’ their communities on a political level, our respon-dents must be perceived as capable of providing safety at the local level, and withoutthis legitimacy and the degree of access it grants them within their local communities,they would have little value to or standing with governmental actors or donors.

The interdependence of these two forms of protection is intended to lead to adynamic of mutual reinforcement. However, in the context of increasing violenceand threat discussed above, the ability of the peace agreement/process to providesafety for loyalist communities has been questioned and the trade-off betweensecurity and safety made by our respondents has become evident within theirlocal communities. As such, the latter have begun to re-articulate demands forcommunity-level protection on behalf of their leaders.

This is reflected in the ambiguity of the conception of ‘community’ apparent in ourinterviews. For our respondents, maintaining the paramilitary structures throughwhich they exerted local control was viewed as integral to their role as non-violent‘community leaders’ within the peace process. Indeed, we noted that frequentlythere was an elision made by these actors between ‘the organisation’ and ‘thecommunity’, as reflected in these two comments:

Community has two elements. I am a former prisoner, so for me thecommunity has always been the UDA. But also this area, these housingestates, the people who live around my home—that’s also the community(group interview, 2009).

Community means our constituency: I mean, former UDA personnel andtheir families. But it also means the areas we live in, you know, thehousing estates. People in these areas look for leadership from the UDA(group interview, 2009).

In both of these quotes, the notion of ‘community’ elides the paramilitary organi-sation and those it is perceived to protect; that is, the ‘community’ is defined by thescope of protection and social influence provided by the paramilitary organisation.Our respondents appeared to see no contradiction between this notion of ‘commu-nity’ and that promoted by the peace process (a notion rooted heavily inthe concept of civil society). Indeed, several of our respondents claimed that thetraditional structures of their former ‘organisations’ provided the basis for theelements of discussion, consultation and ‘participative’ policy-making that areconsidered factors in the civil society-based notion of community promoted by thepeace process. For instance, one respondent claimed that:



The structure of the UDA actually gives us all the resources that we need.We debate an issue at leadership level, make decisions, and these arefiltered out to the community within hours (group interview, 2009).

However, as our interviews continued (particularly in explicit discussions of ‘dissi-dent Republican’ activity in 2008–09), our respondents heavily emphasised theirneed to conceptualise the community in terms of the UDA’s capacity to providelocal safety. In most cases, this involved the attempt to assert that, despite itsnon-violent role and civil society-like structures, the organisation in which theywere involved remained rooted in its paramilitary functions and structures, andmaintained its paramilitary ethos. Indeed, several interviewees spoke of a goal ofbuilding up a community structure ‘that does not call itself the UDA but thatconnects the community in the same way’ (group interview, 2009). Similarly,another respondent remarked that ‘the structure must remain, there can be noquestion of dissolving the organisation now. The respect endures, even though theleadership is not armed’ (group interview, 2009). Frequent references were made tothe perceived necessity of maintaining paramilitary command structures in order torespond to threats of localised disorder and violence. Referring to the period afterthe Massereene Barracks attack, one respondent pointed out that:

if the [paramilitary] structure weren’t there, we would have had a situ-ation where people would get drink in them and go act the hero [byattempting to avenge the murders themselves] (group interview, 2009).

He illustrated this by explaining that, at least in the view of the leadership of theUDA and UPRG, it is not difficult for anyone to arm themselves: many residents ofNorthern Ireland have legally held weapons in their possession, so anyone whowants a gun ‘can easily find one, decommissioning or no decommissioning’ (groupinterview, 2009).

The preservation of ambiguity within our respondents’ conceptions of communityis telling. Their self-perceptions both as paramilitary leaders and as ‘community’(that is, civil society) leaders active in the peace process corresponded to a contextin which confidence that the peace process could protect local communities wasstrong. However, as the threat of ‘dissident Republican’ violence increased, ourrespondents felt a stronger need to re-emphasise their paramilitary role, thussignalling to their local communities that they were still capable of providingprotection in the form of localised safety. An important part of this was reaffirmingthe existence and reputation of the UDA. All of the interviewees reflected upon theneed to downplay their affiliations with paramilitary organisations in public set-tings, but at the same time affirmed ‘the need to reassert the [paramilitary] organi-sation’s integrity’ and, in doing so, to ‘be believable’ as a paramilitary organisation(group interview, 2009).

As such, in the post-GF/BA period, our respondents have faced the challenge ofmaintaining both sides of their role as ‘community leaders’ by embodying both theimage of the civil society leader and that of the paramilitary commander. In the faceof increasing ‘dissident Republican’ violence, they have faced significant pressure toshift the balance such that their role in providing localised protection is still evidentand ‘believable’ to members of their local communities. At the same time, however,



they must walk a fine line: appearing to provide protection as local safety (that is,in their paramilitary roles) may compromise their task of protecting the peaceagreement/ process.

Protecting the Peace Process: ‘Keeping a Lid on Loyalism’As discussed above, the UDA has consistently defined local communities (and, ona broader level, union with the UK) as the object of its protection. However, sinceformally entering the peace agreement and the peace process that has followed,our respondents have been tasked with a new object of protection: the peaceagreement/process itself.

Since the mid-1990s, in which Loyalist paramilitary actors played a small butintegral role in the negotiation of the GF/BA, they have been expected to contributeto upholding and protecting the agreement and the policy processes associated withit. However, they have (ironically) been asked to achieve this task by instrumen-talising the influence, local control and coercive power through which they havetraditionally maintained control in local communities. For our respondents, this hasinvolved walking a fine line between relinquishing their coercive power entirelyand mitigating it sufficiently to adhere to the demands of the peace agreement/process. This is not simply due to unwillingness to give up the paramilitary struc-ture, but rather an inherent dynamic of their involvement in the peace process.Simply put, if our respondents completely relinquished their paramilitary roles,they would no longer possess the capacity to uphold one of their primary roles inthe peace agreement/process: maintaining local order, which is integral both totheir role in protecting the peace process and in providing localised safety.

To negotiate this dilemma, we argue, our respondents presented their actions totheir local ‘communities’ in terms of a win-win situation: the peace process wouldguarantee security in the form of a cessation of inter-paramilitary fighting (includ-ing parallel demands on republican leaders to control ‘dissident’ factions), whichwould in turn provide safety for local communities by preventing inter-paramilitaryattacks and attacks by paramilitary actors on citizens. This effectively meant that theUDA (and indeed all paramilitary organisations involved in the GF/BA) wasexpected to do the same: that is, to protect the peace process by maintainingdisciplinary control within its own ranks and over the communities whom itclaimed to represent.

One of the most important means for maintaining order—and a key justification formaintaining the paramilitary command structure—is the use of disciplinary actionwithin the UDA. In order to achieve the unanimity necessary to ‘deliver’ theircommunities into a peace process and to maintain its aims, organisations andmovements use a range of tactics—including persuasion, coercive command struc-tures or even physical threats—to attain cohesion and compliance among theirmembers. Paramilitary leaders often respond to dissent among lower-rankingmembers by cutting them off from ‘former’ paramilitary structures, and thus fromlocal social worlds and resources necessary to their well-being (Mitchell 2011, chs8 and 9). It is important to note that despite attempting to do so for several years,neither of the authors of this article has been able to make contact with any



non-ranking members of Loyalist paramilitary organisations (that is, those withoutan official executive role), with the exception of one ‘bodyguard’ to a high-rankingactor who accompanied us on several interviews. This reflects the tight controlmaintained through the structures of the organisation.

In addition to maintaining discipline within its ranks, expelling or vilifying dissent-ers has also been a common tactic for maintaining order within the UDA. Indeed,one of the ways in which our respondents sought to prove their ability to protectthe peace agreement/process was by actively identifying ‘dissidents’, or non-conforming elements who were likely to attempt to undermine the peaceagreement/process. In the words of a former UDA brigadier,

it wasn’t them over there [the PIRA] against us. It was the people whosupported the Good Friday Agreement against the people and the peaceagainst those who didn’t (Respondent 1, 2010).

As a result, one of the primary functions of these leaders has been to silenceplurality (of norms, approaches or opinions) within their own organisations andcommunities (Mitchell 2011) as a means of preventing activities that could threatenthe peace process. These dynamics became publicly visible in the events surround-ing the ‘Loyalist feuds’, which continued from the early to the late 2000s, in which‘dissident’ Loyalists such as Johnny Adair, Billy Wright and individuals associatedwith the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) were publicly disowned and disciplined bythe leadership of their organisations (see Cusack and MacDonald 2000; Anderson2004; Moloney 2010), who have since emerged as contemporary leaders and actorswithin the peace process. In these cases, Loyalist paramilitary leaders explicitlyinstrumentalised their capacity for internal violence in order to protect the peaceagreement/process—and to maintain their place within it.

The pressure to protect the peace agreement/process by exerting internal controlincreased in relation to looming deadlines for the decommissioning of the UDA’sweapons, which coincided with the intensification of ‘dissident Republican’ vio-lence. Between March 2009 and March 2010, when the majority of the interviewsand focus group discussions for this project took place, the UDA was given thedifficult double task of restraining responses to a wave of ‘dissident Republican’violence while convincing its membership that the decommissioning of weaponswas feasible and desirable. In other words, UDA leaders needed to convince theirlocal communities that the protection of national-level security in the form of thepeace agreement/process trumped the demand for local protection from ‘dissidentRepublican’ attacks.

It should be noted that decommissioning was important to the leadership, not onlybecause it would help them to attain more political legitimacy and influence,particularly given the fact that the other main Loyalist paramilitary groupings, theUlster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commando, decommissioned in 2009,but also because if they did not meet the deadline, any guns found by the PoliceService of Northern Ireland (PSNI) could be used as evidence to prosecute them(Respondent 3, 2010; Respondent 1, 2010), raising the threat of incarceration forpast offences and being branded as enemies of the peace process. Thus, the under-standing that their involvement in the peace agreement/process was simulta-



neously integral and threatening underpinned their activities during this period,and their entire claim to provide security hinged on the successful delivery of policyaims such as decommissioning.

Indeed, the ability of former paramilitary actors to maintain a leadership role withinthe peace process is predicated on their being perceived as non-violent by relevantgovernmental actors. As such, any lack of ‘discipline’, or resistance or rebellion,within the ‘community’ or even among members of the leadership could be seen tothreaten the peace and therefore the long-term survival of these ‘communities’, asconceptualised above. Yet the struggle to create and maintain compliance is evidentin narratives of how paramilitary leaders attempted to quell dissent within theirranks or challenges to their leadership, and the manner in which they did so. Asone key UDA figure commented,

It’s not easy to maintain [a] disciplined response and to make peopleunderstand why there’s no point in retaliation [to dissident violence].Many people were saying ‘youse are letting us down’ by decommissioningand forbidding any violent response (group interview, 2009).

Indeed, our respondents suggested that the many meetings held by the UDA sincethe Massereene Barracks incident of 2009 were characterised by heated disagree-ment (Respondent 3, 2010). Some UDA leaders promoting the stance of non-violence have been made the object of death threats from members of their owncommunities; indeed, when one of the authors interviewed a former UDA memberin spring 2010, he was within 24 hours of a death threat which was believed toderive from within his own organisation (Respondent 1, 2010).

How, then, did the UDA’s leadership manage to deter its membership from retali-ating and convince it to continue with the decommissioning process? Interviewswith UDA leaders shortly after the murder of Constable Stephen Carroll in 2009 arerevealing: the UDA agreed with PSNI that ‘a lid would be kept on any loyalistresponse’ (group interview, 2009). Thus, they dispatched leaders in many of itscommunities to ‘put out the message that people should be restrained’ and toconvey an unambiguous message to their supporters: ‘anything you do in retalia-tion will isolate you from your own community’ (group interview, 2009). Here, theappeal to refrain from violence was not linked directly to the peace process, butrather to ‘the community’ and the UDA’s self-styled role as its protector.

Our interviews showed how the PSNI knew clearly who to contact within theLoyalist leadership in order to gain assurances ‘that there would be no knee-jerkreaction [to the murders—i.e. no Loyalists would respond to the murders byattacking Catholics or republicans], and that police resources could therefore beconcentrated on the investigations’ (group interview, 2009). As the intervieweesexplained:

The UPRG met immediately [after news of the Massereene Barracksattack broke], and then held a meeting with the PSNI area commanderand other officers to discuss the way forward. There was an expectationthat the leadership of the organisation should show leadership by beingvisible in the nearby communities and making clear statements calling forpeople to remain calm (group interview, 2009).



Approximately 30 influential actors within the UDA met within the next two days,and it was explained what was expected. As one interviewee said, ‘we were seen tobe liaising with the PSNI and Sinn Fein despite all of the security concerns’ (groupinterview, 2009).

It was made clear in the interviews that ‘in the old days, this [the Massereene andConstable Carroll murders] would have opened up the floodgates’ (group inter-view, 2009)—meaning that a significant public backlash would have occurredwithin the local community; yet none was apparent. One interviewee explainedwhy he believed this occurred: ‘we [the leadership] said that the [paramilitary]organisation condemns the actions of these extremists, and that there would be nogoing back to the past’ (group interview, 2009). The leadership then embarked ona deliberate outreach programme to connect with (L)oyalist communities across theregion, ‘reminding the community of the destructiveness of the tit-for-tat actions ofthe past’ (group interview, 2009). In other words, by formulating and adopting acommon message on this subject, the UDA exerted its presence as a dominantregulatory figure within the community: its leaders decided what the community’sresponse to violence should be. Our respondents were careful to assert that theiractions were also based on popular agreement; they claimed people no longer haveany appetite for ‘that sort of violence’ (group interview, 2009), and that the desireto assert a ‘moral victory’ by standing firm in the face of violence held great appeal.Nevertheless, our respondents maintained that their role in actively exerting theirinfluence as UDA leaders (rather than ‘community leaders’ representing the peaceprocess) was crucial to achieving this state of affairs.

Moreover, although the actors in question firmly asserted that they used discussionsand other non-violent means to disseminate their decisions, it is clear that thesetactics did not seriously entertain the possibility of other options. Our transcriptionsof discussions with the UDA leaders at that time note the following:

While earlier in the interviews it was asserted that the UDA has a strongculture of inclusive communication ... the interviewees acknowledgedhere that, in the past, action was often controlled by, as one put it: ‘is fearthe right word?’ They acknowledged that ‘constituents used to just obeyorders, and were used to that’. But all of the interviewees were emphaticthat ... ‘after the shootings [by dissident Republicans in 2009], we had topatiently explain what the response was to be, to one person afteranother’ (group interview, 2009).

In other words, rather than simply handing down commands, the UDA leadershipused its command structures to communicate messages and ensure compliance.While not as threatening, perhaps, as the physical violence used in the past, thiscreated a potentially irresistible dynamic for the individuals affected: they couldeither accept the commands of the leadership (and it should be noted that thesecommands were given to whole communities, not just paramilitary members) or beassociated with dissent from the ‘peace process’ and, potentially, with the ‘criminal’elements of Loyalism. The recent shadow of the Loyalist ‘feuds’ and, indeed, thecontinuing desire of Loyalist leaders to deter the actions of criminals (Respondent1, 2010) renders such a fate extremely undesirable.



Thus, in attempting to fulfil their role of protecting the peace agreement/process,and thus contributing to the broader goal of national-level security, our respondentsexerted forms of power and control derived from their paramilitary history andstructure. This was deemed crucial in our respondents’ attempts to provide evi-dence of their central role in protecting the peace agreement/process and main-taining their stake in it. In the words of one UDA leader,

when there was no violent response to the attacks in March, it sort oflegitimised the organisation—we met with the Secretary of State, the DUP,there was lots of high-level and high profile interaction (group interview,2009).

In the context discussed above, the conflict between protection as security andprotection as localised safety becomes clear: our respondents’ communities, andspecifically their demand for localised protection against ‘dissident Republican’attacks, became viewed as a threat to the peace agreement/process. Faced with thisproblem, our respondents effectively prioritised their role in providing security overthat of providing local safety, by using their disciplinary power to protect the peaceagreement/process from their local communities, rather than protecting these com-munities from ‘dissident Republican’ attacks. For our respondents, this appeared tobe the best way of maintaining their role in the peace process, and thus providinglong-term safety to their communities. However, we shall now argue, this has alsodiminished the perceived capacity of these actors to provide local-level protection:the very source of influence upon which their roles in the peace process derive.

A Dilemma of Protection: Safety or Security?We have argued that former UDA leaders have been placed in a precarious position:by promising their communities safety by means of the security promised by thepeace process, they have diminished their own perceived capacity to providelocalised safety, particularly in the face of an apparent increase in threats to loyalistcommunities. In turn, the difficulty of ‘keeping a lid’ on the responses of membersof their communities to the violence of ‘dissident Republicans’ threatens to under-mine the very capacity for ‘community leadership’ upon which their role in thepeace agreement/process relies. Instead of generating a virtuous dynamic, in whichlocal safety and national security are elided, this has created an unstable dynamicin which the relationship between these two forms of protection is one of directconflict and mutual exclusivity. We now analyse this dynamic by examining twoways in which this impacted upon our respondents: the compromising of theirreputation for providing safety through the decommissioning of weapons; and theexposure of their trade-off between security and safety as a poor one with theircontinued demonisation.

Co-operation with the peace process involved the process of decommissioning or,quite literally, relinquishing the physical or coercive power upon which Loyalist(and indeed all) paramilitary actors had relied for so long in order, from theirperspectives, to guarantee the safety of their local communities. In a context inwhich violence against Loyalist communities or members of the security forces wasperceived to be rising (see above), the loss of such power constituted a significant



blow to the capacity of our respondents to guarantee localised safety. Simply put,their legitimacy traditionally derived from their ability not only to use violencecoercively in order to attain obedience and compliance, but also from their abilityto protect these communities—without which the former would most likely nothave been tolerated. As such, the process of decommissioning, undertaken againsta background of increasing uneasiness in loyalist communities about the threat ofviolence, created fissures within the organisation and thus diluted the power ofparamilitary leaders to drive this process through.

According to UDA-affiliated interviewees, many members of their communitiesdemanded that the organisation keep some of its weapons right up until the veryend of the decommissioning process in February 2010 (Respondent 3, 2010;Respondent 1, 2010). According to one prominent actor, this was because ofongoing disbelief that republicans had in fact surrendered all of their weapons, andthe fear that they could resume violence at any time. He related a narrative that heperceives to be widely held within his community regarding the trustworthiness ofthe IRA decommissioning process in the 1990s:

[Republicans] on the border had been shooting people with his AK-47 fortwenty years ... And the truth is, [they] still has [their] AK-47[s] ... I’d saythat if we were to drive down the Falls Road and start shooting out of thewindows of the car, do you think the IRA’s going to phone the police? Wewon’t get to the bottom of the hill; we’d be killed with the weapons theystill have ... they never want to be caught defenceless (Respondent 1,2010).

As a result, he claims, the demand for paramilitary structures to protect Loyalist orworking-class unionist communities from this kind of threat is high. As such, thedecision to decommission weapons at a time when evidence of this threat appearedto be mounting had a severe cost in terms of the trust that paramilitary leadersneeded to gain, and the degree to which they needed to leverage their influence inthe community in order to push it through and secure compliance. Simultaneously,the perception that the laying down of weapons might constitute a lapse in thisprotective function threatened to diminish the level of compliance and trust thatmembers of these communities were willing to give. This was expressed by severalinterviewees who narrated the long and arduous process of convincing their coresupporters that decommissioning was the right thing to do, even at significant riskto themselves from dissenters within their own ranks (see above) (Respondent 3,2010; group interview, 2009).

In addition to the loss of their effective coercive power in the form of arms, ourrespondents were also affected by what they perceived as a poor status among thegovernmental actors with whom they have engaged. This, we argue, has createdthe impression that neither are they able to provide localised safety, nor do theypossess the influence or standing to ensure the overall security of their localcommunities by taking an effective leadership role in governmental processes. As aresult, the trade-off they have made between protecting the peace agreement/process and protecting local communities has become clear and, in some cases, hasappeared as a ‘poor deal’ for the latter.



According to several respondents, Loyalist paramilitaries are rapidly losing therespect and authority upon which policy-makers expect them to leverage in orderto keep peace and prevent violence (Respondent 2, 2010). Many respondents wereconcerned that negative public perceptions of Loyalists promoted in and throughthe peace process (see above) diminished their own authority within the groupsthey were expected to control and/or influence. This was not only due to allega-tions of criminality surrounding the Loyalist feuds in the early 2000s, or to theassumption by the media that the decommissioning process had been an exchangeof ‘guns for [peace] money’ (essentially, a form of political racketeering), but alsobecause ‘mainstream unionists’ and republican politicians have tended to ‘demo-nise’ them (Respondent 3, 2010; Respondent 2, 2010). With regards to the secondallegation, one respondent dismissed it by claiming that if he had gone to theauthorities and said: ‘“we want to hand in all of our guns, and we want to getmoney for them”—I’m not joking, I would have been killed’ (Respondent 3, 2010).In this quote, our respondent invokes the sense of integrity he attributes to hisparamilitary background—he makes it clear that trading ‘guns for money’ would beconsidered a betrayal of the UDA’s principles and not tolerated within the organi-sation. In so doing, he juxtaposes this account to what he believes is an unfair anddamaging portrayal within public and policy discourses.

The sense that Loyalist paramilitaries have persisted in being treated as ‘unequalpartners’ in the peace process in relation to their republican counterparts—despitetheir efforts to fulfil the role of protecting the peace process at the expense of beingseen to provide local safety—compounds this problem. It suggests that the trade-offhas been one in which the benefits of involvement in the peace process—andindeed the prioritisation of this over the demand for local safety—are not a ‘gooddeal’ for loyalist communities. Awareness of this problem, we argue, has at leastpartially inspired the concentrated effort on behalf of our respondents to restore thereputation of the UDA vis-à-vis the peace process, which they have described as anuphill battle. For instance, one respondent claimed that Loyalists have been framedby the media as a ‘super-criminal gang’ before and throughout the peace process(Respondent 1, 2010). Another stated that although he has:

never had a conviction for anything, ... my name is blackened, my nameis mud locally; but if I go out to the Republic of Ireland, or anywhere elsein the world, and people hear what I’ve done, I’m like a frigging hero. It’sso frustrating (Respondent 2, 2010).

Indeed, there is a sense among Loyalists that ‘even if we [Loyalists] invented a curefor cancer we would be regarded with suspicion’, and that ‘when a Protestant doessomething wrong he is immediately a loyalist’ (group interview, 2009). Thesecomments suggest frustration among our respondents that they have risked notonly their reputation and standing among their local communities, but perhapsalso, from a paramilitary point of view, the safety of these communities, reflected inthe fact that a significant amount of the violence that took place in recent decadesoccurred within loyalist areas (Smyth et al. 1999; Mitchell 2006; McKitterick et al.2007).

This, in turn, has had destabilising effects upon our respondents in terms of theirown ability to maintain influence in their local communities, and therefore to ‘keep



a lid’ on dissent, as discussed above. In the absence of the physical/coercive powerprovided by arms, the main (official) form of power available to paramilitary actorsis their ability to make political gains for their communities—in part, by proving totheir local communities that they are respected and therefore powerful membersof the peace process. However, our respondents suggest that ongoing suspicionof them on the part of their ‘partners’ in government (perhaps due to their needto maintain elements of their paramilitary organisations) has diminished theirstanding.

Two such issues were narrated by participants in this project. One prominentformer UDA activist described his involvement in the ‘Conflict TransformationInitiative’, a project that aimed to address ‘problems within loyalist communities’and ‘transform the UDA’ (BBC News, 4 April 2007) and which, he claimed, hadreceived substantial support from ministers in Northern Ireland and Westminster.In early 2007, the project was awarded some £1.2 million in government funding(Belfast Telegraph, 15 July 2007). This money was, however, withdrawn by the thenminister for social development, Margaret Ritchie of the SDLP,4 in October of thesame year. Despite facing significant challenges from both within and without theLocal Assembly (BBC News, 16 October 2007), the minister stood by her decision,citing the UDA’s failure to decommission its weapons—a condition that was notpart of the original funding agreement. Her actions were later declared unlawfuland in contravention of Stormont’s ministerial code (BBC News, 19 November2008). The former UDA activist we discussed this issue with claimed that:

the minister wrote off that project ... because it was anathema to her—[she said] ‘how could you give money to the UDA?’ [the project] wasdestroyed by a Catholic, right-wing, nationalist ... because we wereProtestants (Respondent 2, 2010).

According to this respondent, such political judgements have a lasting impact onthe governmental legitimacy of former paramilitary actors:

we’re still being hounded by the press [who say]—‘where did these[individuals] go? Who’s giving these people money?’ We’re actuallyworking on how to get rid of violence and weapons, and we’re beingpilloried, we’re being harassed (Respondent 2, 2010).

Another respondent (a former politician) related similar concerns in reference to aproject aimed at repainting paramilitary murals on his local housing estate. Heclaimed that his projects and his organisation were treated with suspicion bygovernmental agencies despite significant efforts to meet their criteria and goals:

We wanted to deal with [paramilitary murals in our estate] four years ago,five years ago, and we couldn’t get a government department to engagewith us because they were saying we were all bad people. So that’s theattitude that you get, particularly from the Minister of the DRD, who ...just hates us. [The ministry claims it] turned us down. Well, [in fact] weturned them down (Respondent 5, 2010).

The persistent mutual mistrust and mutual reliance between politicians and para-military actors discussed above, as well as the perception that the ‘peace dividends’



enjoyed by Loyalist communities are few (Respondent 5, 2010; Respondent 2,2010; Respondent 6, 2010), makes it very difficult for Loyalist paramilitary leadersto maintain an image of political efficacy, which is perceived as necessary in termsof ensuring the security of their local communities. It is for this reason that manyLoyalists are concerned that if they do not present a positive image of ‘how [they]will be remembered’ (Respondent 6, 2010; Respondent 3, 2010) and clear theirnames of all allegations of corruption and violence, they will lose face both withintheir communities and among governmental actors and the broader public.

As a result of this dynamic, one UDA-affiliated respondent claims that paramilitaryactors have expended much of the ‘social capital’ they require in order to maintaincontrol over their communities as they are expected to do (Respondent 2, 2010). Heclaimed that the esteem of Loyalist paramilitaries—one of the key bulwarks againstreprisal attacks in response to ‘dissident Republican’ violence—is extremely fragileas a result of the way in which politicians leveraged it in the ‘peace process’. Hesummed up the problem as follows:

there’s a continued IRA traditional armed force [’dissident Republicans’]still being used against us, and our community and our home and ourhomeland and our estate and all the rest of it ... You can only take that solong ... [and] with the limited resources we have, and the lack of supportwe’re getting from those in power [former paramilitary actors] can onlytell people for so long [to refrain from violence] ... your respect and yourcredibility only lasts so long ... and it’s pretty much at the last stick at themoment ... it’s getting stretched (Respondent 2, 2010).

As a result, he twice reiterated, things ‘could end up blowing up in our faces’(Respondent 2, 2010).

Concluding DiscussionProtection is one of the crucial elements underpinning both peace agreements/processes and the actions of paramilitary actors. Using Bauman’s (2006) distinctionbetween the broader notion of security, or confidence in one’s safety derived froma sense of overall stability and predictability, and safety, which refers to the literalprotection of people, property and the physical aspects of communities, we haveargued that our respondents have been placed in the vexed position of attemptingto provide both. In taking an active and formal role within the GF/BA and the peaceprocess associated with it, former UDA paramilitary actors and their UPRG coun-terparts relied on the assumption that the broader baseline of security provided bythis approach would offer the best chance of safety within their local communities.As such, they made protection of the peace agreement/process a priority, evenwhen this meant prioritising the demands of governmental actors over those ofmembers of their own organisations. This appeared to function smoothly enough ata time when the peace agreement/process seemed capable of providing sufficientlyrobust conditions of security to guarantee localised safety for communities, whetherloyalist, republican or otherwise.

However, since 2009, an increase in violence on the part of ‘dissident Republicans’has significantly undermined confidence in the security provided by the peace



agreement/process within loyalist communities. As such, they have reneweddemands on our respondents to provide protection as safety through reprising theirformer roles as paramilitary leaders. This has created a seemingly impossibledilemma for our respondents, in which they must decide which form of protectionto prioritise—often under the pressure of threats that jeopardise their own safety. Inother words, rather than promising safety by means of security, they are compelledto prioritise either security or safety—or, in the cases outlined above, security at theexpense of safety. This, we argue, reflects how easily the ‘virtuous cycle’ expected toemerge from our respondents’ involvement in the peace agreement/process hasinverted itself to become a vicious dynamic, in which the demands of local safetyand national security are placed in direct competition, with possibly explosiveresults. The recent acts of violence undertaken by the UVF in response to perceivedthreats from ‘dissident Republicans’ in July 2011 (Belfast Telegraph, 16 June 2011;BBC News, 21 June 2011) underscore the context of risk in which this dynamic isunfolding. If the UDA is unable to maintain—or perhaps restore—its credibility inproviding both security and safety, it may be unable to stem violence from withinits own organisation and local communities.

Our analysis provides several insights with regards to the involvement of paramili-tary actors in peace agreements. First, beyond debates over the moral dilemmaof whether or not actors associated with violence should take part in peaceagreements/processes (Bloomfield et al. 2005; Guembe and Olea 2006; Shirlow andMcEvoy 2008), there is an equally and perhaps more important debate to beengaged in regarding the practical feasibility of this. This article has suggested thatthe seeming mutual supportiveness of safety and security that underpinned thesigning of the GF/BA and the role of the UDA and other paramilitary organisationswithin it was myopic in several senses. First, it involved the creation of an instru-mental (and essentially hypocritical) relationship between paramilitary actors andthe peace process. It demanded that paramilitary actors relinquish their formerroles, thus publicly prioritising the claim of security made by the peace agreement/process and compelling former paramilitary actors to do the same. At the same time,however, it premised this claim to security at least in part on the ability of formerparamilitary actors to maintain control over their communities, which they did byinvoking their former status and maintaining elements of their organisations.Whether or not the framers of the peace agreement/process explicitly intendedparamilitary actors to protect it by preserving their violent roles (we doubt this isthe case), it was certainly the result that occurred in practice. As such, as much asthe framers and supporters of the peace agreement/process may condemn para-military violence, they have created a situation in which its continuation isassumed, and indeed, made necessary to the protection of the peace process. Thishas been evidenced most recently by the bold dissension of parts of the UVF to playalong with the peace process narrative, by painting new, militaristic and plainlythreatening territorial murals in East Belfast ‘as a message to those involved incross-community work’ (Community Telegraph, 9 June 2011). In this context ofLoyalist frustration with the peace process, and in the face of increasing demandsfor a response, it is possible that our respondents may find themselves underincreasing pressure to consider shifting their priorities back towards local ‘safety’,and thus towards the forms of paramilitary activity that the peace agreement/



process seeks to discourage. In another scenario, the loss of ‘political capital’described above, in addition to the loss of both coercive power and political repu-tation, may make it increasingly likely that our respondents’ influence within theirorganisations and communities will be usurped—perhaps by individuals for whomthe ‘safety’ function is regarded as primary. Our argument is not that paramilitaryactors should not be involved in peace agreements and processes. Rather, we arguethat there needs to be more careful attention to the basis of their involvement, andthe potential conflicts it may create within their organisations (not just betweenvarious paramilitary and political groups), particularly in the face of circumstancesunanticipated by the peace agreement (such as ‘dissident Republican’ violence).

Second, our analysis shows that while the relationship between safety and securitymay be mutually beneficial during periods of relative stability, in which local safetyis not a major concern, the instant in which safety reappears as a tangible issue, thisrelation may be inverted into one of mutual exclusivity and conflict. As such, theframing of the peace agreement/process took for granted that confidence amongloyalist communities in the ability of the peace agreement/process to provide safetyby means of security would remain constant, not anticipating the results when thiscapacity was threatened. Moreover, in removing both the capacity for local protec-tion and, simultaneously, exposing the weak reputation of former Loyalist para-military actors within the peace process at a time when their communities feltsignificantly threatened, this situation has severely undermined their stability—andperhaps that of the peace agreement/process.

This suggests that the difference between national-level security and local safetyshould be taken seriously in the creation of peace agreements. Specifically, it shouldnot be assumed that national security should automatically take precedence overperceptions of local safety, especially when the former is predicated upon the latterthrough institutional and political arrangements. Moreover, it must be acknowl-edged that as the balance between these demands shifts, so must the responses androles of former paramilitary actors. The current inflexibility of the arrangements,which compels former paramilitary actors to accept the loss of their reputation forproviding local safety even in the face of threat and loss of confidence in nationalsecurity, can only undermine both. The problem here lies precisely in the fact thatnational-level security has been simultaneously predicated on local safety andbrought into conflict with it. In order to prevent this, greater care needs to be takenin assessing the demands made on former paramilitary actors and the likelihood oftheir ability to meet them—particularly when much of the weight of maintainingthe peace agreement/process is made contingent upon their actions. In such cir-cumstances, in Northern Ireland and in other contexts in which this trade-offbetween safety and security has been made, the peace agreement/process is boundto be plagued by this dilemma of protection.

About the Authors

Audra Mitchell, Department of Politics, University of York, York YO1 5DD, UK, email:[email protected]

Sara Templer, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, 53–67 University Rd, BelfastBT7 1NF, Northern Ireland, UK, email: [email protected]



NotesAudra Mitchell would like to thank in particular her co-author and the respondents who contributed tothis piece. She would also like to thank Adam White, Liam Kelly, two anonymous reviewers and theeditors of BJPIR for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. Part of the research for this project wasmade possible by the ‘Liberal Peace Transitions II’ project (2009–11, funded by the University of St.Andrews and Nuffield Trust) and by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada (2008–10).

Sara Templer would like to thank her co-author, all of the respondents who participated in the researchthat informed this article, and the reviewers and editors of the BJPIR. She would also like to acknowledgethat this research was enabled by a Queen’s University PhD Scholarship at the Institute of Irish Studies,Queens University Belfast (2008–11).

1. For the purposes of this article, ‘Loyalists’ (with a capital ‘L’) designates loyalists associated withparamilitarism, while ‘loyalists’ with a lower-case ‘l’ refers to individuals and communities associatedwith working-class unionism.

2. For more information on the major Loyalist paramilitary organisations and their evolutions see, forexample, Cusack and MacDonald (2000); Taylor (2000); Gillespie (2006); Wood (2006); MacAuleyand Spencer (2011).

3. The term ‘dissident Republican’ refers to armed factions associated with the republican movement,but not formally under the control of the Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein or bound under the GF/BA.

4. Social Democratic and Labour party, a nationalist party with a predominantly Catholic electoral base.

UDA and UPRG Interview RespondentsRespondent 1: A well-recognised member of the UDA/UPRG known to have significant commandauthority in and around Belfast. In some cases, interviews with Respondent 1 were conducted in thecompany of and including the input of his bodyguard.

Respondent 2: A prominent member of the UPRG.

Respondent 3: A prominent member of the UPRG and former UDA political prisoner.

Respondent 4: A prominent member of the UPRG and former UDA political prisoner. While not directlyquoted in this article, Respondent 4 participated in the interviews and discussions recorded in the groupinterview, 2009.

Interviews were taken between 2009 and 2010, and respondents were interviewed separately by eachauthor. The initial set of interviews, including the group interview, was undertaken in 2009 by the firstauthor and the second set of interviews was conducted in 2010 by the second author. This approach wasintended to track changes in the opinions and views of the respondents as the situation described in thearticle unfolded. In addition, follow-up conversations with each of the respondents were held in 2010–11to confirm the opinions expressed in interviews.

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