Analyzing Archived Government Correspondence Files (1969-73): Pro-Government Militias in Northern Ireland

This project compiles and analyzes over 8,000 pages of declassified British government documents from 1969 to 1973 to investigate how the UK state understood and responded to pro-government militias (PGMs) during the Northern Ireland conflict. The data include two original coded datasets: (1) an incident-level event dataset capturing PGM, state, and anti-state violence between 1971–1973, and (2) a correspondence dataset that codes British government assessments of PGMs along key theoretical dimensions, such as state benefits, costs, ideological alignment, and local popularity, as well as the depth of collusion. Together, these resources offer a rare window into the strategic calculations behind state–militia relations and provide a foundation for evaluating variation in state support, suppression, or indifference toward informal armed actors.