The International Perception of the Irish Republican Army and Chechen Insurgency

This purpose of this project is to examine how the labels used to describe the Irish Republican Army and Chechen insurgency changed after certain acts of violence. This paper begins by describing the history of imperial subjugation of Ireland and Chechnya, as well as examining the similarities between the actions and motivations of the IRA and Chechen insurgency. Then, to study the change in language to describe these groups, two searches were conducted into the New York Times and International Newsstream databases. The first search examined articles about the IRA and Chechen insurgency published between 1998 and 2009, while the second search examined articles published two months before and two months after certain acts of violence, including the September 11 attacks. The results are then described, namely that 9/11 lead to an increase in the label of \u27terrorist\u27 to describe the IRA and Chechen insurgency, even though 9/11 was unrelated to the conflicts occurring in Northern Ireland and Chechnya. This indicates that acts of violence external to Anglo-Irish and Russo-Chechen conflicts influenced the language and rhetoric media networks used to describe the IRA and Chechen insurgency. Implications are analyzed as to how this finding influences global counterterrorism operations and how the history of these conflicts will be remembered