The American historian and author of several books on the IRA and international conflicts, Dr James Bowyer Bell, has died.
Friends said Dr Bowyer Bell (72), who published more than a dozen works, died from kidney failure in a New York hospital. He was best known for The Secret Army, one of the first comprehensive studies of the IRA.
Irish-language publisher Mr Pádraig Ó Snodaigh said: "He was a great scholar and a great friend." The Republican Sinn Féin vice-president, Mr Des Long, said: "He was the first historian to link the modern IRA with the republican struggle from 1916."
Prof Henry Patterson of the University of Ulster said: "His books were useful in terms of the mechanics of the IRA as a military organisation. But they lacked a deep grasp of the broader political and social context in which the IRA operated and so ended up rather uncritical."
Dr Bowyer Bell's most recent work was Murders on the Nile: The World Trade Center and Global Terror. Other books include The Irish Troubles: A Generation of Violence 1967-1992, The Dynamics of the Armed Struggle, and The Gun in Politics: An Analysis of Irish Political Conflict 1916-86.
He had no Irish family links but visited Ireland regularly, building up extensive IRA contacts in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994 he spoke at the West Belfast Festival.
"Over the years, I've known all the decision-makers, all the main actors, and all the bit players in the movement," he said. "I've been in places I ought not to have been, as a disinterested observer among subversives."
His books were criticised by some for presenting too romantic a picture of the IRA. Dr Bowyer Bell saw himself as a figure outside the establishment. He spoke of the "outrageous hypocrisy" when spokesmen for states "capable of strategic bombing of civilian targets" branded as terrorists "defenders or members of a secret army".
He wrote that during his research he had "been to more republican commemorations in the stretch of a year or two than anyone in Ireland but Joe Clarke, the 1916 veteran". Recently more incisive journalistic accounts of the IRA have taken precedence over his books.
He had been a research scholar at Harvard and at the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His paintings on the Troubles were exhibited in New York.