The thirty-year war between the Republican movement and the British state has primarily been considered as a military and political conflict: in comparison to these main battlefields, social and economic factors have been relegated to peripheral roles. In particular, the terrain of civil society and its relationship with the state has rarely been theorized as a decisive factor in the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The power of the contemporary state is often characterized by the degree to which it can successfully create and reproduce political and social hegemony, a type of power that rests on complex forms of consent as opposed to simple coercion. In post-Gramscian theorization, for example, this dominant consensus is produced by a multifaceted interaction between the state in all its forms and ‘independent’ civil society.