There is very little that Irish republicans, the Irish government and the British government all agree on when it comes to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Yet one thing around which there is a rare degree of unity is that all three groups see the onset of a military stalemate as the driving force behind the transformation of Irish republicanism. If anything, what is remarkable is the overall level of ready acceptance of this idea by senior government officials and leading republicans. The assumption is that republicans tried to achieve their goals through violence for twenty-five years more or less, but when both the British army and the IRA realised neither was close to defeating the other, negotiating positions were re-evaluated and a dignified route out of violence was crafted. Framing the resolution of the conflict in these terms pushes the negotiation process and the nature of dialogue to centre stage in the transition to non-violence. It also implicitly embraces an understanding of republicanism's transition as binary in nature, going from a radical group to a largely moderate one with little grey area in between.

This book sees the process of republican moderation differently, both in terms of the causal drivers of the process and in terms of what it understands moderation to mean. Instead of seeing moderation as a decision taken on the basis of an appraisal of the military capacity of the IRA, the decision to moderate has been placed within its wider political context. Moderation occurred as a result of sustained and increasing inclusion within a set of stable democratic institutions. This was a path-dependent process of increasing returns that locked republicans behind the choice of increased engagement and participation and which heavily incentivised removing radicalism.

From this perspective, moderation is much more of a gradual and long-term process that dates back to initial engagements with elections at the start of the 1980s. It was not a simple dichotomous shift from radical to moderate, but rather it was a multi-layered process with some aspects of republicanism changing at a different pace than others and some aspects remaining continuous and changing little.