Introduction: Constructing and Contesting Victimhood in Global Politics

Abstract

Questions about who can and cannot be considered a victim permeate almost all efforts to describe, map, legislate, resist, and/or dismantle harms both specific and systemic in nature. Discourses of victimhood inform individual, group, and national identities, shape peacebuilding and transitional justice programmes, and set the boundaries of debate about migration, sex work, crime, empire, and much else besides. These formations are not wholly specific to our present moment, of course: Alyson Cole has described how a “war on welfare” has been underway since the 1990s, which identifies “victimists,” people unwilling or unable to adopt neoliberal postures of self-reliance, and pits them against “anti-victimists,” or conservatives who themselves claimed to be threatened by a feminized system of political correctness. Nevertheless, in recent years victimhood has been prominently