The globalisation of transitional justice as a framework for the resolution of conflicts is a remarkable phenomenon of the post-Cold War era (Bell and Craig, 2000). In different contexts this framework has significant consequences for women’s equality. This article asserts that a conceptualisation of gender that intersects with other dimensions of inequality in state formation provides an important tool for understanding contemporary transitional justice processes. This complex tool of intersectional analysis is used to explore the issue of women’s equality in Northern Ireland’s transition. This is applied to the problems of women’s absence from negotiations and the silence in these negotiations on matters to do with women’s day-to-day lives. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and the enactment of the equality legislation enacted in the Northern Ireland Act 1998 are the textual sites of analysis. These documents comprise the formal transitional framework for Northern Ireland. The article examines the theoretical tensions and practical implications inherent in universal claims for women’s equality in a situation where recognition of ‘difference’ is enshrined in both the equality legislation and the mechanisms for future democratic representation. The article concludes by suggesting that transitional justice discourse can benefit from the theoretical challenges posed by intersectionality and that social stability in NI and in other conflicted societies may be strengthened through addressing the corrosive impacts of inequality.

This article seeks to address a specific aspect of Bills of Rights that tends to be neglected in the literature. That is, the process of how Bills of Rights are drafted. In particular it focuses on the drafting of a particular right-equality with a view to identifying if there is a link between: (a) the manner of how an equality provision is drafted and securing legitimacy of the final product; (b) whether a participative process can influence the formulation and articulation of an equality provision; and finally (c) if the ‘people’ have spoken through this document, does this encourage the judges to take a less restrictive approach in interpreting the equality provision? This task is undertaken by drawing upon the Canadian experience, which then will be used to draw out lessons for those jurisdictions where the process of drafting an equality provision in a Bill of Rights is under way. The article is supported in its conclusions by a series of semi-structured interviews with key players involved in the drafting and interpretation of the equality provision in the Canadian Charter.

This essay argues that the more the state or the political is treated as autonomous the more the specific conception and history of Jews dissolves into a universalised and universalistic category. From this perspective, the emancipatory rights granted to Jews appear as exercises of an arbitrary sovereign power rather than the product and compromises of diverse interests in which Jews are present. This thesis is articulated through a discussion and comparison of two anti-emancipationist radical thinkers; Bruno Bauer and Girogio Agambem. Where Bauer demands the Jews’ emancipation from Judaism as a precondition for the granting of rights, Agamben dissolves the specific Jewish dimension of the Holocaust into a universalist notion of domination and the figure of the Musselman. I conclude by noting that, in the wake of this dissolution, any reference to Jewish specificity, even in death, can be interpreted as the Jews demanding ‘special privileges’ over and above others, thereby running the risk of the Holocaust taking its place in the chain of the antisemitic imagination.