‘Co-Conspirators in Murder’: Dirty Wars, Meta-Conflicts and Bipartisan Transitional Justice

ABSTRACT∞ As transitional justice becomes focused on transitions out of identity-based conflicts, the ability of interventions to transcend partisan approaches and be perceived as legitimate by all sides has become a key challenge. Meta-conflicts – conflicts over what the conflict was about – often obstruct efforts of dealing with the past. This note explores ways to eschew the common zero-sum game of condemning one party or the other, based on the 2024 report of the Kenova inquiry in Northern Ireland, which examined dozens of conflict-era murders relating to the operation of a British state informer in the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) counter-informing unit. Kenova’s finding that ultimately both the British state and the IRA were responsible for killings of alleged informers is utilized here to draw broader implications regarding the possibility of bipartisan transitional justice, suggesting that the murky betrayals of ‘dirty wars’ could be an effective starting point of such efforts.