In recent years, states among the world's oldest industrialized democracies have selectively surrendered their commitments to liberal democracy in order to safeguard against (real or perceived) national security threats. How do state actors discuss, arrive at, and justify such authorization of extralegal violence against targeted citizens? The United Kingdom wrestled with this balance between national security and democratic protections during the period of its "Troubles" with Northern Ireland. During this time, the U.K. government interned 1,874 un-convicted Irish Catholic citizens and subjected as many as fourteen to the "five techniques" of torture. This research leverages an original archival resource -- 8,430 recently-declassified pages from the British Prime Minister's security-related correspondence files (1969-74) -- to analyze the processes by which the United Kingdom internally justified its extralegal internment and torture policies. It identifies the government's internal decision-making processes, compares these internal motivations to the external justifications it publicly presented to support these violent policies, and seeks to identify themes and patterns which may apply to other cases of states? deliberations about using extralegal violence during times of perceived national insecurity. This analysis advances conflict studies and socio-legal scholarship by 1) providing a nuanced understanding of how robust democracies erode rule-of-law protections; 2) identifying the internal-external dimensions of democratic states? authorization of violence; and 3) contributing historical knowledge of the U.K. "Troubles." This project increases public-facing scholarship on the complexities of protecting both democracies' national security interests and their rule-of-law principles. Its focus on using detention and torture to quell terrorist threats are particularly relevant to contemporary political debates the world over.
This project combines deductive and inductive qualitative social science methods with computational science techniques to identify, analyze, and generalize state justifications for violence, as follows. First, it uses scientific process-tracing methods to identify a series of hypothesized internal motivations and justifications that lead state agents to authorize violence against Irish Catholic citizens. Second, it collects and selectively analyzes additional data on the U.K. Government's public statements. This allows for the identification of (in)consistencies between the government's internal and external justifications for violence. Third, it uses novel natural language processing (NLP) computational science techniques to: build models that detect justifications' text patterns, cross-validate qualitative conclusions, generalize justifications to other cases of state authorizations of violence, and evaluate the efficacy of NLP for this type of research. This research lays the groundwork for future text-as-data machine-learning analysis of government documents. It also applies and advances the frontiers of NLP by examining whether and how these techniques can be tailored to identify recent or unfolding threats to democratic principles.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
