ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which the discourse of human rights began to assert itself as the dominant language in which resistance to the state and its laws was expressed. It highlights the way in which the violent hierarchy has been inverted in the case of Northern Ireland. The chapter suggests that the Agreement is subject to the same dynamics of contestation as the emergency legislation that preceded it. It demonstrates the circular nature of the relationship between violence and law. The chapter also suggests that the increasing resistance and challenge to the Agreement, and the legal framework of transition that it introduced, represents the third stage of the economy of violence that of the violence of reflection. The relationship between the two strategies of political violence and legal contestation is illustrative of the complex relationship between violence and law and whether or not the two can be regarded as separate phenomena.
