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"The battle over Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination was described by the media as a "turning point' in America's history of female witnessing" (Time), a "tale of two internets" (Wired), and a "duel with tears and fury" (NYT). Each of these headlines highlighted a significant aspect of what the hearings revealed about American culture: the triumph of women's voices in the age of #MeToo; anxieties around echo chambers that divide political communication; and the hyperemotional nature of politics in the era of far-right populism. None, however, captured the deepest, and perhaps most insidious, character of this event as a battle over who is a victim. While these accounts describe or explain victimhood as a dominant discourse of Western cultures at large, they do not address what kind of world is a world of proliferating victims where two sides compete to establish their suffering as more legitimate than that of others? How did it come to be as it is today? What are the benefits of living in it? And, more importantly, what are the costs? In Wronged!, Lilie Chouliaraki's grapples how the proliferation of victims produces its own victims by obfuscating truth itself, and populating public discourse with too many voices of pain while selectively authorizing some of those voices over others. Just like the spread of fake news blurs the boundary between fact and rumor, competing claims to pain blur the line between systemic and tactical suffering. Chouliaraki examines this distinction to navigate the difference "between fighting for victimized people," which demands an account of the conditions of their suffering, and "promoting a victimhood culture," which encourages claims to pain. Fighting for the victimized is the moral drive of her argument, while promoting a victimhood culture is the object of her analysis"--

Why is being a victim such a potent identity today? Who claims to be a victim, and why? How have such claims changed in the past century? Who benefits and who loses from the struggles over victimhood in public culture?In this timely and incisive book, Lilie Chouliaraki shows how claiming victimhood is about claiming power: who deserves to be protected as a victim and who should be punished as a perpetrator. She argues that even though victimhood has long been used to excuse violence and hierarchy, social media platforms and far-right populism have turned victimhood into a weapon of the privileged. Drawing on recent examples such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as historical ones from the major wars of the twentieth century and the Civil Rights Movement, Wronged reveals why claims of victimization are so effective at reinforcing instead of alleviating inequalities of class, gender, and race. Unless we come to recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for what it is—a matter not of victimhood but of injustice—Chouliaraki powerfully warns, the culture of victimhood will continue to perpetuate old exclusions and enable further injuries

This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and

Drawing on a view of self-mediation as a pluralistic practice that potentially enhances our democratic public culture but which is closely linked to the monopolistic interests of the market, this volume critically explores the dynamics of mediated self-representation as an essentially ambivalent cultural phenomenon.

The soft power of war : legitimacy and community in Iraq war discourses / Lilie Chouliaraki -- The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq / Phil Graham and Allan Luke -- Blair's contribution to elaborating a new "doctrine of international community" / Norman Fairclough -- War rhetoric of a little ally : political implicatures and Aznar's legitimatization of the war in Iraq / Teun A. van Dijk -- The Iraq war as curricular knowledge : from the political to the pedagogic divide / Bessie Mitsikopoulou and Dimitris Koutsogiannis -- Computer games as political discourse : the case of Black Hawk down / David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen -- Spectacular ethics : on the television footage of the Iraq war / Lilie Chouliaraki

Liking the Instagram post of a humanitarian celebrity, e-shopping from a charity shop or signing an online petition on Black Lives Matter have become popular forms of digital activism. While such activism, what I call post-humanitarian solidarity, has helped popularize important causes worldwide, in this paper, I argue for the need of a critical pedagogy that also alerts us to the limitations of this form of activism. It is, in particular, the synergy of corporate humanitarianism with the entertainment industry and platform capitalism that such critical pedagogy should focus on, raising questions about the political and ethical implications of post-humanitarian solidarity and the kinds of global publics it gives rise to. (DIPF/Orig.)

In this article, I enquire into the historical circumstances (past and present) under which vulnerability, an embodied and social condition of openness to violence, turns into victimhood, an act of affective communication that attaches the moral value accrued to the vulnerable to everyone who claims it. The 20th-century victimhood, I argue, emerged as a master-signifier of emotional capitalism through the two grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis and human rights, each of which tactically mobilizes affective claims to trauma or injury to bestow the moral value of the sufferer to any powerful claimant independent of the position of vulnerability they speak from. Turning to the 21st century, I place victimhood within the communicative context of post-recession and digital neoliberalism to show how the two amplify, accelerate and complicate the circulation of affective claims to suffering, rendering platformized pain a 'new normal' of our culture. In order to address the implications of this 'new normal' on the most vulnerable in society, I propose the distinction between 'tactical' and 'systemic' vulnerability as a heuristic frame that enables us to ask questions about who claims to be a victim, from which position and to which effects; and, in so doing, helps us to scrutinize the social contexts in which affective claims to victimhood are made and the power relations such claims reproduce or challenge.

In this article, the author focuses on the struggles over self-representation that soldiers have engaged in at two key historical moments of modern Western warfare: the First World War, the first major industrialised conflict of the 20th century (1914–1918); and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the so-called 'War on Terror', which marked the emergence of information warfare in the 21st century (2001–2014). The Western soldier's self-representation, the author concludes, has shifted from a practice of observing the battlefield as a strange place and himself as an 'other' within it, to a practice of considering the 'other', here the Iraqi or Afghani local, as the self, someone who shares a Western sense of humanity. These antithetical self-representations, the author argues, point in turn to complex transformations in the technologies, moralities and cultures of warfare, throwing into relief uneasy tensions in the West's 21st-century interventionist conflicts. In their attempt to move away from the massacres of the 20th-century wars, such conflicts are suspended between sharing humanity and misrecognising 'others', between liberating and conquering, between saving and taking lives.

Lilie Chouliaraki: The Moralisation of the Spectator. On the September 11th live footage

In this paper, I discuss extracts of the September 11th live footage on television from the vantage point of discourse, that is of how the reported event "comes to mean", how it becomes intelligible through television's meaning-making operations. Specifically, I study the mediation of the September 11th as a mediation of "distant suffering", drawing upon the work of Luc Boltanski (1999) on "morality, media and politics". My aim is to identify the ways in which the September 11th television spectacle engages the affective potential of the spectator and evokes a specific disposition to act upon the suffering – that is, to act politically. My perspective on the September 11th thus concerns the televisual mediation of distant suffering and its moralising effects on the spectator. First, I introduce the problematic of representing distant suffering in terms of, what Boltanski calls, a "politics of pity" – a politics that aims to resolve the Spacetime dimensions of mediation in order to establish a sense of "proximity" to the events and, so, engage the spectator emotionally and ethically. Second, I contrast three different modes (or "topics") of representing suffering, by reference to three live footage extracts from the Danish national television channel (DR): street shots of Manhattan, just after the Twin Towers' collapse; the summary of the day events, with shots from the second plane collision and President Bush's first public statement; a long shot of the Manhattan skyline burning.
I describe each "topic" in terms of its Spacetime dimensions, its distinctive semiotic elements, and the affective mode and moral horizon it opens up for the spectator. In concluding, I briefly touch upon implications for the "moralisation" of the spectator, involved in the September 11th "topics" of suffering.