The Narrative Construction of Victimhood in Transitional Justice

• In Event: Ideational Contributions to State-Building

Abstract

In societies transitioning from internal armed conflict, narratives of victimhood frequently become sites of intense political contestation between actors seeking to advance their accounts of past violence. Although the study of victims of wartime violence has become increasingly important across the social sciences over the last two decades, previous research has overlooked the implications of institutionalising particular victim narratives into the formal processes and mechanisms of transitional justice. The scholarship has consequently failed to gauge how officially sanctioned victimhood narratives may influence post-conflict orders and the kind of peace being built in transitional societies. In light of these disciplinary shortcomings, I ask: How do state actors instrumentalise narratives of victimhood in societies transitioning from internal armed conflict; and how do these narratives shape post-settlement power relations and peacebuilding in these societies? To explore this question, I devise a framework of understanding grounded in critical theory. The framework surveys how the (re)production of victimhood narratives can shape modalities of truth and knowledge production, configure power relations, and structure peacebuilding processes in societies emerging from conflict. Using critical discourse analysis, I apply my framework to compare practices of victim representation in the mechanisms of transitional justice established in Sri Lanka, Colombia, Sierra Leone, and the United Kingdom, revealing the ways in which state power operates in and through these practices to produce ‘legitimate’ victims. My conclusions point to the importance of official victimhood narratives in understanding the socio-political organisation of post-settlement orders and the peace being built in the aftermath of internal armed conflict.

Author

• Alejandro Posada-Téllez, University of Oxford