It is common for those from a social sciences background to make the point that Northern Ireland is perhaps the most (over-) researched place on the planet. In this context, it is particularly interesting when some relevant topics are overlooked by academic investigators. James A. Cousins's Without a dog's chance: the nationalists of Northern Ireland and the Irish Boundary Commission, 1920–25 deals with an aspect of history that previously received scant attention but is the focus of multiple recent publications. The experience of northern nationalists, the establishment of Northern Ireland, partition and the Boundary Commission are central to academic books released in 2019 by Robert Lynch, Diarmaid Ferriter, Donnacha Ó Beacháin and Cormac Moore. Cousins's work is a fifth very recent addition to the growing catalogue on the subject. Of course the centenary of the Government of Ireland Act and the fallout of Brexit explains some of this new research. However, Northern Ireland was also topical throughout the Troubles, although the early history of partition remained under-researched then.

There were of course some notable exceptions in terms of Troubles-era research, such as Eamon Phoenix's seminal work Northern nationalism: nationalist politics, partition and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland 1890–1940 (Belfast, 1994). Phoenix drew on documents released in the late 1970s, so material has been available for a considerable time. It seems likely that authors steered clear of the subject matter for reasons related to the Troubles. This explanation has also been proffered by Margaret O'Callaghan who has argued that the partition experience complicates the standard narrative that explains the Troubles in terms of factors internal to Northern Ireland. While Cousins identifies the lack of literature up to the mid-1990s, disappointingly he does not explore the reasons for this. The story of the Boundary Commission is of course interesting of itself, but further exploration of the reasons for the lack of research until the peace process era would have helped frame the work's significance.

Cousins begins by introducing the anthropological concept of a ‘trapped minority’ (p. 6). This represents a useful descriptive tool. He outlines how trapped minorities exhibit a ‘sense of being marginal twice over, within two political entities’. In the case of northern nationalists, there was of course alienation from the Northern Ireland state as well as from the southern state. Cousins focuses on the press in an attempt to understand how the nationalist identity evolved in the formative years of Northern Ireland. Specifically, he draws on material from the Irish News, Derry Journal and the Fermanagh Herald. With the Irish News being more influenced by the constitutional nationalist tradition associated with Belfast M.P., Joe Devlin, and the two provincial papers more readily identified with Sinn Féin, Cousins avoids treating northern nationalists as a homogenous group. This analysis of intra-nationalist divisions is particularly worthwhile. The book's title, Without a dog's chance, relates to a comment by Kevin O'Higgins, who used the phrase to describe the likelihood of any part of Belfast being added to the southern jurisdiction. Cousins's exploration of the division between these Belfast nationalists and those on the border is the strongest part of the work.

The revolutionary period up to the start of the Irish Civil War is described adequately. However, the focus is very much top down giving primacy to analysis of political events. With the vast array of information available in the Irish Military Archives, it is surprising that neither the Military Service Pension Collection nor the Bureau of Military History are consulted to contextualise the conflict more. That said, there is good use of archival material from the respective governments in Dublin and Belfast. It would be unfair to suggest that the focus is entirely on elite level actors. Correspondence to local newspapers, for example, is referenced extensively. Nonetheless, this is not the type of highly localised study that typifies much of the best academic research of the period.

The discussion of the Boundary Commission is particularly illuminating. The relationship between northern nationalists and the nascent Free State government is explored in a nuanced way. The concluding chapter details how the experience of the commission united northern nationalists in opprobrium towards the Free State government. Overall, this is a reliable and accessible account of the northern nationalist experience. The author is somewhat unfortunate in that others have covered much of the same ground in recent publications. The question remains as to why the topic was largely ignored for so long.