Description
This paper interrogates the necropolitical dimensions of Britain’s approach to peacebuilding following the conflict in Northern Ireland. Focusing on the UK’s Legacy Act and its juridical management of conflict-related deaths, I demonstrate how provisions for conditional amnesty, limitations on prosecutions, and restrictions on inquests constitute the state’s relationship to violence and accountability, revealing law’s role in obscuring as much as clarifying the past. Situated within the longer genealogy of British counterinsurgency law and the global legacies of empire, the Act exemplifies the interplay between law, governance, and sovereignty in post-conflict justice, raising broader questions about legitimacy and accountability in liberal democracies. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, I analyze how Britain deploys liberal legality and democratic accountability as instruments of sovereign preservation within the reconciliation process. Subordinated to a procedural self-policing that publicly acknowledges potential institutional wrongdoing while at the same time rehabilitating the mechanisms of state power that made such wrongdoing possible, transitional justice is, I argue, configured as a means of reasserting sovereign legitimacy and maintaining hegemony over post-conflict narratives, institutions, and accountability itself.
