J. Bowyer Bell: John Bowyer Bell, who has died aged 72, was an historian and specialist in conflict theory and comparative terrorism studies. He was best known in Ireland as the author of The Secret Army, the definitive history of the post-war IRA.
He first became interested in the subject while researching the various revolts against British colonial rule from 1944 until the withdrawal from Aden.
Convinced that the IRA merited a separate study, he spent several years in Ireland in the late 1960s researching the book.
The first edition of The Secret Army was published in 1970. In it Bell wrote: "If Ireland today looks like stony ground for the seeds of republican revolution, tomorrow may be fairer. If today prospects in the South look bleak, the North beckons."
Events in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s had revealed "possibilities beyond belief".
Bell's expectations were more than fulfilled as Northern republicans opted for the Armalite rather than the ballot box advocated by the Dublin-based leadership. The events of the following 30 years provided a case study of terrorism and counter-terrorism that he faithfully chronicled.
The IRA trusted him and talked freely to him. He got to know the internal workings of the republican movement and observed its military machine at close quarters. His access to IRA leaders provided him with an insight into republican thinking that no other historian could match. His knowledge and understanding of political violence in the Middle East and Africa equipped him to place the Northern Ireland conflict in an international context.
Critics argued that he was often less than objective when writing about republican violence. His acceptance of the IRA's notion of "armed struggle" was called into question.
He attracted further criticism when he wrote of IRA killings that "those responsible might have been ruthless, brutal, indifferent to the risks to innocent life, but they were purposeful".
The Protestant working class, completely lacking in purpose, had no "compelling and luminous dream". The loyalist paramilitaries were motivated by "fear and loathing, and you can't write treaties to deal with vengeance".
Nevertheless, in Back to the Future: The Protestants and a United Ireland (1996), he displayed a considerable degree of sympathy for Protestant criticism of Southern society and of the Catholic nature of Irish nationalism
In August 1994, he gave a lecture at the West Belfast Festival in which he said that the IRA was the only party to the Northern conflict that had a clear view of what was wrong, how the situation could be changed, and what should replace the status quo.
The Provisionals, he said, knew that the source of the conflict was Britain and that only physical force - "the very Irish way of saying 'shooting people'" - could change the situation. But he suggested that if the British army withdrew, the republican movement might seek a peaceful way of achieving its aims.
He acknowledged that nationalism was more unpopular in the Republic than elsewhere in the West, and that the republican movement was widely detested, especially by the young.
The IRA ceasefire did not cause Bell to revise his analysis. In the Continuity IRA he found an "emerging secret army" with the potential to create serious security problems. He found it sobering in 1996 to hear the leaders of what he called the "Republican IRA" affirm their total conviction in the primacy of violence. "If nothing more, this secret army, absolutely dedicated to the withdrawal of the British from Ireland, can greatly trouble an island already long troubled by the republican dream."
From Alabama, John Bowyer Bell studied at Duke University. His teaching career included stints at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, and research associate at the Institute of War and Peace Studies, both at Columbia University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He undertook research into political violence in such countries as Cyprus, Ethiopia, Lebanon, South Africa and Spain. His publications include Terror Out of Zion (1977), A Time of Terror (1978), The Irish Troubles (1993), and The IRA, 1968-2000 (2000). His most recent book was Murders on the Nile, The World Trade Center and Global Terror (2002).
His monograph on the nature of terrorists, The Myth of the Guerrilla, was translated into Irish and published as Faoi Scáth an Ghunnadóra in 1993. He wrote for many academic journals, and an article, Towards a Theory of Deception, is included in the current issue of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence.
A keen painter, he exhibited his work in New York and Dublin. He also contributed art criticism to a number of US publications. His wife, Nora de Brún, and their daughters, Rebecca, Elizabeth Virginia and Maria, survive him.
John Bowyer Bell: born, 1931; died, August 24th, 2003.