Book Review: Penality in the Underground: The IRA's Pursuit of Informers by Ron Dudai
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231168691 |
| Author | Eugene McLaughlin |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
‘sustained, psychologically impactful and harms to the same or similar extent as violence
which is definably torture’and as possibly ‘enabled by coercive control, marital rights,
relative powerlessness between perpetrator(s) and victim/survivor(s), and on structurally
violent familial or cultural norms’(p. 62). Focusing on impact rather than intent, she
argues, allows a better understanding torturous violence—redirecting us to reflect on
some of the fundamental assumptions.
Whether conscious or not, we (scholars, practitioners and survivors of violence) are
active in maintaining our frames of reference and operation—wielding symbolic and
material power in what and who matters. Canning’s insights are freshly and searingly
written—equally for those merely interested and those deeply implicated.
References
Boddice R (2017) Pain: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mathiesen T (2004) Silently Silenced. Winchester: Waterside Press.
Ron Dudai, Penality in the Underground: The IRA’s Pursuit of Informers, Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2022; 256 pp.: 9780198759409, £80 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Eugene McLaughlin, City, University of London, UK
These were paranoid times. These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspi-
cious of everybody. You could have a nice wee conversation with someone here, then go away
and think, that was a nice, wee unguarded conversation I just had there—least until you start
playing it back in your head later on. At that point you start to worry…
(Burns, 2018: 27–28)
It has been left to journalists, participants and novelists, rather than criminologists, to
write about the intrigue that defined the ‘dirty war’in Northern Ireland. Ron Dudai rec-
tifies this with a penetrating, meticulously argued analysis of how the proclaimed right to
kill ‘legitimate targets’, including informers and collaborators, reigned in this treacherous
terrain. He uses the term ‘underground penality’to conceptualize the punishments
employed by non-state groups to impose internal discipline and control individual behav-
iour deemed to be criminal by those groups. Dudai’s empirical focus is the Irish
Republican Army’s (IRA) system of justice that was used to punish alleged informers.
He analyses the governmental functions that this justice system served from a variety
of angles.
This thought-provoking book uses a holistic sociology of punishment rather than ter-
rorism or policing perspective to study informing. Dudai is interested not only in the
nature of the IRA’s punishment of alleged informers, but also the other goals and pur-
poses these practices realized. His core concerns are: what functions does informing
play in the lives of rebel groups, such as the IRA, and why and how does it play these
roles? In so doing, Dudai wishes to broaden the subject matter of penology, which for
Book Reviews521
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