Winning hearts and minds

Winning hearts and minds is a counterinsurgency principle that Frank Kitson developed into a central argument of his military thinking: suppressing an uprising is not enough if the surrounding population becomes more hostile to the forces doing the suppressing. In the book, the principle sits at the intersection of military intelligence and political legitimacy. It also resonates with the changing strategies of those contesting discrimination in Northern Ireland, from peaceful protest to armed struggle and, later, electoral politics.

Kitson's counterinsurgency principle

In 1969, while on a fellowship at Oxford University, Kitson began systematising his experience of colonial conflicts into a theory of counterinsurgency. His 1970 book, Low Intensity Operations, argued that a campaign should not merely put down an uprising but win the local population’s support. The aim was to defeat the movement while recognizing that military action could shape how civilians understood the conflict and the forces operating in their midst.

Kitson arrived in Northern Ireland in 1970 as commander of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, responsible for Belfast. The military presence expanded sharply during the period: from 2,700 troops in the summer of 1969 to more than 30,000 by the summer of 1972. In that setting, winning public support was not an abstract addition to military strategy. The army was operating among close-knit communities, where armed groups could be difficult to distinguish from civilians and where soldiers’ conduct could affect the information, cooperation, or hostility they encountered.

Intelligence, force, and public trust

Kitson regarded intelligence as essential to defeating an insurgency. New recruits were joining faster than police files could be updated, and republican and loyalist paramilitaries did not look different from the civilian population around them. The problem was especially acute in West Belfast, where Brendan Hughes’s D Company operated. Soldiers described the area as a place where the Irish Republican Army was protected by a wall of silence; informing carried a deep social stigma.

The book places that obstacle beside the effects of the army’s early tactics. Kitson recalled an approach in which soldiers formed a line and used gas while waiting for people to throw bricks. The gas harmed local residents and, he said, made them hostile. The contrast is central to the principle: coercion might be used in a counterinsurgency campaign, but tactics that alienated civilians could undermine both the army’s standing and its ability to obtain reliable information. Winning support and gathering intelligence were therefore connected aims, not separate tasks.

Peaceful protest and the struggle for legitimacy

The idea of public support also illuminates the hopes surrounding the 1969 march from Belfast to Derry. The students were protesting systemic discrimination against Catholics, who faced exclusion from good jobs and housing and had little political power through which to improve their circumstances. In Northern Ireland, no Catholic had held executive office during the devolved system’s first half-century. The marchers believed peaceful protest could expose injustice; the example of the Selma march suggested that a forceful response to nonviolent demonstrators might itself help bring change. Some also hoped that the conflict’s divisions could be reframed as a struggle between young and old rather than Catholics and Protestants.

That hope did not survive unchanged. After the ambush at Burntollet Bridge, Dolours Price concluded that peaceful marching would not convert those opposing change. In 1971 she joined the Irish Republican Army, taking an oath in her family home to promote its objectives and obey orders. Her decision followed a confrontation that had altered her confidence in nonviolent resistance. The book thus presents political alignment as something contested through experience: the same desire to overcome injustice could be directed toward peaceful protest or, after violence, toward armed organization.

From armed struggle to electoral politics

The principle’s political dimension reappears in the shift toward elections. After Frank Maguire’s death created a vacancy in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat, republicans proposed that Bobby Sands run for Parliament while on hunger strike. His candidacy was a striking departure from the movement’s longstanding suspicion of parliamentary politics and abstentionism. It sought public attention and support for the hunger strike through an electoral contest, even as Sands remained imprisoned.

By 1983, Gerry Adams was also seeking a parliamentary seat for West Belfast. Dolours Price, who had abandoned violence as her own means of pursuing Irish unity but had not abandoned republicanism, canvassed for a Sinn Féin candidate and supported Adams’s campaign. She encouraged voters and drove them to polling stations; Adams won. The book does not equate this electoral strategy with Kitson’s military doctrine. Rather, the sequence places different struggles for public allegiance side by side: a counterinsurgency campaign seeking information and civilian cooperation, protest seeking recognition of discrimination, and republican electoral politics seeking votes and political influence.