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Northern Ireland, relative to its population size, is possibly one of the most researched societies in the world. Since the start of the current Troubles in 1968, thousands of books and articles have been written about the conflict. The intellectual progenitor—sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not—of much of this scholarship is Richard Rose’s 1971 book Governing Without Consensus, together with a later and much shorter 1976 book, Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice, and many journal articles, book chapters and newspaper and magazine articles. As this chapter points out, the themes highlighted in this pioneering work, most notably the idea of establishing institutions that would create regime legitimacy, were not only highly influential in shaping later academic discourse about the conflict but also was eventually incorporated as a key underlying principle of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.