Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Victim Capital for Recognition and Redress -- Chapter 3. The Bosnian Conflict, its Aftermath and Victims' Demands -- Chapter 4. 'Why is my leg worth less?' Disability and the Loss of Life of Military and Civilian War Victims -- Chapter 5. Graves and Redress: Families of the Missing Persons and the 'Srebrenica Effect' -- Chapter 6. Between Recognition and Oblivion: Victims of Sexual Violence and Torture -- Chapter 7. Victimhood, Recognition and Redress from a Comparative Perspective.

What explains the existing varieties in victim-centric state policies of redress in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)? Rather than analysing BiH as a special case of a divided ethno-national state, this article studies domestic victimhood politics as a phenomenon with wider comparative applications for postconflict contexts. Redress as a set of policies that legally recognize victims/survivors of wartime atrocities and provide them with in-kind and financial support has increasingly entered the demands of victims/survivors in BiH. Many have sought to expand their rights by new legal frameworks at the state and subnational level. However, only some have succeeded (or partially succeeded) with their demands. Why? Using fieldwork data and relying on literatures in transitional justice and peacebuilding, I argue that the differences go beyond ethno-national divisions and identity politics and are explained by how victims/survivors utilize their victim capital that combines mobilization resources, moral authority and international salience.

This article introduces the concept of "hijacked victimhood" as a form of strategically leveraging victimhood narratives. It is a subset of strategic victimhood, which is a relatively common communicative strategy whereby groups claim victimhood status in contests over power and legitimacy. Political leaders who use the strategy of hijacked victimhood present dominant groups as in danger, as current or future victims, and in need of protection (especially by the crafter of the narrative) from oppressive forces consisting of—or indirectly representing—marginalized and subaltern groups. In the process, leaders hijacking victimhood blunt the rights-based claims of such groups. Analyzing Viktor Orbán's and Donald Trump's elite rhetoric in Hungary and the United States, respectively, we inductively document varieties of hijacked victimhood in their political communication, showing how Orbán leverages historical suffering and resistance while Trump constructs economic and value-based harms for dominant groups. Making both conceptual and empirical contributions, we argue that at the heart of hijacked victimhood is a reversal of the victimizer–victim dichotomy, a new portrayal of moral orders, a teleological ordering of past and future harms, and a mobilization of security threats—all used to preserve or expand a dominant group's power.