Event Details

The annual Martin Edmonds Memorial Lecture is hosted jointly by the CWD and the Lancaster Military Heritage Group, and open to all.

Martin Edmonds Memorial Lecture 2024: Dr Huw Bennett (Cardiff), 'Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975'

Tuesday 23 January 2024, 17.30-19.00, Lancaster University Campus, FUR - Furness LT1

When Operation Banner was launched in 1969 civil war threatened to break out in Northern Ireland and spread over the Irish Sea. Uncivil War reveals the full story of how the British army acted to save Great Britain from disaster during the most violent phase of the Troubles but, in so doing, condemned the people of Northern Ireland to protracted, grinding conflict. Huw Bennett shows how the army’s ambivalent response to loyalist violence undermined the prospects for peace and heightened Catholic distrust in the state. British strategy consistently underestimated community defence as a reason for people joining or supporting the IRA whilst senior commanders allowed the army to turn in on itself, hardening soldiers to the suffering of ordinary people. By 1975 military strategists considered the conflict unresolvable: the army could not convince Catholics or Protestants that it was there to protect them and settled instead for an unending war.

Huw Bennett is Reader in International Relations at Cardiff University, where he teaches intelligence and strategic studies. He is the author of Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and the Kenya Emergency (2012), and Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975 (2023), both published by Cambridge University Press.