Informing counter-insurgency and the British state: Northern Ireland and legacies of empire

Join Robert Savage (BC), Ron Dudai (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), and Caroline Elkins (Harvard University) for a discussion on the British state's counter-inurgency methods, including the use of informers and agent provocateurs. This symposium will consider how the British state devised strategies to combat the threat posed by Irish Republican militants during the thirty years of political violence colloquially known as 'the Troubles.' It will consider how the authorities used informers and agents provocateur in an effort to combat the threat posed by republican paramilitaries. The event also addresses other counter-insurgency strategies employed in Britain's diminishing empire during a rapid period of decolonization.

Robert Savage is a member of the Boston College History Department and served as one of the directors of the Irish Studies program for over fifteen years. He has published six books, along with numerous articles and chapters, that explore contemporary Irish and British history. His most recent volume, Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain​​​​, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He has been awarded Visiting Professorships at Venice International University, Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University, Belfast, the University of Galway, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was a Leverhulme Fellow. His new book considers the impact of the Northern Ireland 'Troubles' on England in the early 1970s. Professor Savage's presentation is drawn from this current project. 

Ron Dudai teaches at the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Ben Gurion University. In 2025-6, he is based at Queen's University Belfast, where he is a visiting fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He is also an associate member of the Center for Criminology, Oxford University. His monograph Penality in the Underground: The IRA's Pursuit of Informers was published by Oxford University Press (2002), and his articles examining political violence, denial, and transittional justice appeared in, among others, Law & Society Inquiry, Human Rights Quarterly, British Journal of Sociology, Political Studies, British Journal of Criminology, and International Journal of Transitional Justice. He is a co-author of the report Bitter Legacy: State in the Northern Ireland Conflict, and was co-editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice.  

Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, and Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies. Her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and selected as a Book of the Year by The Economist. Her subsequent book. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire was a finalist for the Baille Gifford Prize, selected by The New York Times as one of the Notable 100 Books of 2022, and chosen by the BBC, Waterstone's, and History Today as a Book of the Year for 2022. She and her research were the subjects of a BBC documentary titled "Keyna: White Terror," which won the International Red Cross Award at the Monte Carlos Film Festival. Her research also served as the basis for the historic Mau Mau reparations cases in the High Court of London (2009-2013). Elkins was an expert witness for the claimants, who received an apology and a 20-million-pound settlement from the British government for the torture and systematic abuse they endured in 1950s Kenya.

This event is co-sponsored by the History Department and Irish Studies.