From the 1990s, the emerging demands of victims â organisations began to precipitate changes within the international and national normative frameworks relative to victimsâ rights, at the same time that changes in international norms took place with respect to peacebuilding , in particular in the aftermath of the launch of the UN Agenda for Peace in 1992. As a consequence, over the past two decades, transitional justice and peacebuilding practices have evolved from pre-eminently top-down processes led by national and international actors, towards processes that increasingly seek to incorporate local-level actors, including victims of political violence, in both their design and implementation (Shaw et al. 2010; Mac Ginty 2011). With respect to transitional justice practices and thinking, the central focus today, for example, remains no longer exclusively upon punishing or neutralising perpetrators (Karstedt 2010). Rather, it is increasingly upon restoring and protecting the dignity of those who suffered violence and repression, acknowledging victims and, at least on paper, empowering them to play a role in the societies emerging from these traumatic periods (Humphrey 2003). It has been these principles that are gradually being incorporated into the normative frameworks and practices determining transitional justice and peacebuilding.
Academic scholarship has duly reflected this trend in both peacebuilding and transitional justice. In the case of the latter, the central focus of this volume, GarcĂa-Godos (2016), for example, has claimed that one may even refer to a âvictims-turnâ in transitional justice, as the discipline and transitional justice practices have come increasingly to address directly and respond to victimsâ demands. In fact, a recent special issue of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (2016) was devoted entirely to âappropriate responses to victims of conflictâ. Nevertheless, despite said developments, GarcĂa-Godos (2016, p. 357) identifies âan important absence in transitional justice literature [âŠ]: the victim as political actor.â
The current volume aims to address this lacuna and, at the same time, to challenge the view that victims are passive or apolitical. The research presented here does so by offering a first systematic analysis of what we see as a twofold research agenda, namely the interrelated themes of victimhood âvictims, their individual and collective identities, and their role in and impact upon post-conflict societiesâand the politics of victimhood âmeaning how victimhood is defined, negotiated and contested, both socially and politically. In other words, a central aspect of this volume addresses the difference between victims and victimhood. As Huyse (2003, pp. 57â58) contends , âthe simple fact of having been physically, psychologically or economically harmed is a necessary but not sufficient element [to become a victim]. Other factors play important roles. Social norms and customs, developed in politics, law and culture, partly shape the selection of those who will be allocated victim status.â This latter issue is what we refer to here as victimhood . Furthermore, the concept of victimhood also includes the meaning of this status, or what it means in a given society to be a victim. In other words, victimhood is a social construction shaped by a range of actors, criteria and practices. As such, ideas of victimhood may vary across time and space.
In this regard, the volume engages closely with what we understand as a central tension with respect to the definitions shaping victims and victimhood, in short that of being defined as a victim by others and instances of self-identification as a victim (de Waardt 2016). While the former appears to be particularly relevant in terms of legal proceedings, reparations and the like, the latter plays a fundamental role with regards to (group) identity formation, in turn a factor that may play a key role in either impeding or facilitating peacebuilding , as scholarship has argued (Aiken 2013; Bar-Tal et al. 2009), a point to which we shall later return.
After presenting a brief overview of the scholarship addressing victims and victimhood in transitional justice and peacebuilding processes, the introduction will outline this research agenda in more detail. The introduction then closes, signalling the contribution of the present volume and identifying areas for further research.
Refocusing the Critical Analysis of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding Upon Victims
In our opinion, three main reasons can be identified that may explain the absence of a critical engagement with the politics of victimhood even in spite of the recent âvictims-turnâ in both theory and practice.
Firstly, scholarship addressing victims has been dominated by a legalistic perspective1 that takes victimsâ identity for granted, while acritically accepting the definitions of victims consecrated within those normative legal frameworks relative to victims and victimsâ rights. In short, the process we call the politics of victimhood is largely overlooked, and the identification of victims may wrongly seem self-evident. Moreover, the analysis of the role and impact of victims in transitional justice processes has been predominantly limited to legal contexts, which has subsequently tended to side-line analysis of the potentially crucial issue of the impact of victims within the spheres of the state and society as a whole. With the emphatic emergence of the agenda of transitional justice and a renewed focus upon peacebuilding in the 1990s, the social sciences have become increasingly interested in analysing these processes, evidenced by an upsurge in related scholarship. Nevertheless, the macro perspective that informed early scholarship in political science and international relations, especially at a time when researched focused above all on cross-country comparison and the identification of the determinants of the main processes and outcomes of transitional justice and peacebuilding practices, prevented a critical analysis of victims and their role. Only recently has this trend been challenged by the growing interest in bottom-up and ethnographic studies (Shaw et al. 2010; Sajjad 2013), in which victims represent the principal focus of analysis. Without this shift of emphasis, âvictimâ remains a category necessary for the analysis of transitional and peacebuilding rather than an identity that should be critically engaged with. In other words, âvictimâ represents nothing more than the definitional category of those actors who demand truth, justice and memory in post-conflict settings. If transitional justice claims to place victims at their centre, victims are also âmemory entrepreneurs ,â namely those actors who âseek social recognition and political legitimacy of one (their own) interpretation or narrative of the past. We will also find them engaged and concerned with maintaining and promoting active and visible social and political attention on their enterpriseâ (Jelin 2003, pp. 33â34). Therefore, victimhood is a category that connects transitional justice, peacebuilding and the politics of memory, and looking at victims as political actors helps us better understand these interrelated processes.
Secondly, more than a decade ago, Vinjamuri and Snyder (2004, p. 359) emphasised âthe nexus between advocacy, practice, and scholarship [that] has shaped the scholarship that has come out of the legalist tradition.â From the perspective of the authors, it has been the legalist tradition that has hindered rigorous empirical research on transitional justice. Building upon this argument, we contend that the normative commitment underlying the transitional justice and peacebuilding scholarship has imposed serious limitations, ultimately preventing a critical discussion of victimhood, victimsâ rights and demands and the role that victims may play in peacebuilding. Insofar as victims embody the normative goals of transitional justice and peacebuilding, a critical engagement with their identities and roles might be perceived as a challenge to the legitimacy of the transitional justice and peacebuilding agendas in the first place.
The third reason for the absence of a critical engagement with the politics of victimhood may be the moral superiority associated with the status of victim. In most contemporary societies victims of past political violence are seen as âmoral beaconsâ (Bouris 2007, Chap. 3; Breen-Smyth 2007, Chap. 5). It is frequently assumed that âsomethingâ is owed to victims by virtue of the traumatic experience they went through, and this claim is usually beyond justification (Williams 2008, pp. 86â87). Thus, critically analysing victimhood needs to be carefully and convincingly argued lest oneâs claims be dismissed as offensive polemic or as âvictim-blaming .â Yet, as McEvoy and McConnachie (2013, p. 505) contend, âacknowledging and respecting the pain suffered by victims does not entail a suspension of critical faculties [âŠ] [A]n interrogation of the positionality of victimhood is also crucial in transitional justice.â
The consequence here is that, as mentioned above, the focus of the growing literature addressing victims has understandably been upon victimsâ rights and participation in legal proceedings and other mechanisms2, despite some important scholarship addressing the political mobilisation of victims (Argomaniz 2017). Moreover, the focus has been predominantly on the individual, though the literature has also analysed collective forms of victimhood and sense of victimisation.
Victims in the Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding Literature
Much of the scholarship that focuses on victims emphasises victims â needs and perspectives, and the degree to which they are taken into account by a range of actors and within respective programmes and policies (Robins 2011; Adhikari and Hansen 2013). This victim-centred focus offers insightful bottom-up, context-sensitive analyses of transitional justice and peacebuilding, analyses that question the normative underpinnings and imperialistic pretensions of transitional justice and peacebuilding (Robins 2013). Insofar as these studies seek to shift away from the legalistic approach that, as explained above, has been dominant in the literature, a first task consists of identifying and defining the victims, a task which is very often not as straightforward as it may seem.
More specifically, the above issue directs us towards the critical and, to date, under-explored questions of which factors shape how victims are defined, which criteria determine this definitional process, and who are the actors that may be responsible for formulating this definition (McEvoy and McConnachie 2013). As we explain at the beginning of this introduction, victimhood is socially and politically constructed. Across academic research and in practical interventions, transitional justice and peacebuilding construct subjectivities that, in turn, influence how victims understand, identify and represent themselves. In other words, a tension may exist between being defined as a victim within transitional justice and peacebuilding mechanisms, on the one hand, and instances of self-identifi...