“Draconian Crown Forces” and “Violent Dissidents”: Frames of Police Illegitimacy by Anti-Good Friday Agreement Republicans

Abstract

In this thesis I will answer the question how collective action frames expressed by Irish republicans who oppose the Good Friday Agreement and thus the current power-holders can help understand the through discourses constructed reality wherein the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) should be rejected. In order to do so I will first answer the question what legitimacy means, how it is cultivated and maintained, and why it is important for the police to be legitimate. I will argue that perceptions of legitimacy rely strongly on discourses that construct a reality that (de)legitimises the police force. In the second chapter I will look more specifically at which obstacles the PSNI faces and how it undermines its power to construct a reality in which they are accepted as legitimate by all layers of society. The issues they face result from ‘policing in a liminal space’, meaning the PSNI has to police both the past and the present. In the last chapter I will adapt the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the collective action frames deployed by anti-Good Friday Agreement republicans (AGFARs). In the conclusion I will answer the main question by stating that the collective action frames expressed by AGFARs help understand their discourses as a constructed reality in which the past is continued in the present, and hence the police is still a colonial oppressive power. I argue that more factual evidence is necessary to either address that a minority population unjustifiably gets marginalised, or to build a counter-narrative against violent opposition groups that seem to be growing in support and activity.