The history of Provisionalism can be summarized as one of a long retreat from the highpoint of the early 1970s to the current pragmatic adaptation to the status quo. As the insurrectionary wave that had produced the Provisionals began to recede after 1974, they were forced to manoeuvre for nearly twenty years to avoid obvious military and political defeat. However, by the 1990s Republicans were eventually compelled to yield and through the peace process arrive at their current position of accommodation with the British state in Northern Ireland.

The chapters in Part I discuss the development of Provisional Republicanism as a political organization and a structure of power in the 1980s and 1990s. The central theme is an outline of the processes that transformed the Republican movement from an anti-state insurgency with claims to revolutionary leadership to a potential partner in governing the state it was pledged to destroy. Political sociologists have explained similar political transformations and incorporation as following an iron law of oligarchy. Theories of institutionalization explain how social movement organizations ‘become players in the conventional political process, thereby losing their initial character as challengers to the status quo and the forces in power.’ So powerful are these forces that it has been suggested that in the future, ‘contentious politics’ in capitalist societies might be domesticated and ‘institutionalized into ordinary politics, as were the strike and the demonstration in the nineteenth century.’