In Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, Lilie Chouliaraki explores victimhood as a flexible concept shaped by hierarchies of power in public discourse. Dissecting the weaponisation or erasure of suffering in different contexts, Chouliaraki’s book offers a powerful and nuanced analysis of how victimhood is politicised in contemporary society, writes Amal Latif.

Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood. Lilie Chouliaraki. Columbia University Press. 2024.

Lilie Chouliaraki’s Wronged is a critical interrogation of the concept of victimhood. Its primary argument is that victimhood is not a stable identity but a “contingent and malleable speech act” (103). The author begins by examining the origins of the idea of the victim and the broader histories of this vocabulary of victimhood. The term victim, which first meant a person sacrificed to a deity, and then a person hurt, tortured, or killed by another, by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had also adopted the more general meaning of “oppressed person,” someone who suffers injury or misfortune or is taken advantage of. Around the same time, the noun also turned into a process, “to victimise,” signalling the act of harming someone, and into a subject, “victimiser,” denoting the actor of the harmful process (12). The author maps the parallel shift of the term from a ritual meaning towards an individualised meaning, where victimhood became tied to the corporeal and emotional harm of particular persons.

[The book’s] primary argument is that victimhood is not a stable identity but a ‘contingent and malleable speech act’

Chapter Two, “Who Used to Be a Victim?” studies the emergence of a hierarchy of victimhood across gender and race lines in emotional capitalism before examining the Eurocentric language of pain. This chapter meticulously reproduces the histories of the victim in the mainstream discourse, specifically of the white male soldier as the modern war victim, “a central and recurring image of trauma in our century” (39). The author explicates the argument by drawing examples of modern wars, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were justified on humanitarian grounds: namely, to protect civilians (within and outside these countries) from the oppressive regime of the Taliban, the alleged nuclear weapons of Saddam Hussein (66) and, more symbolically, to protect the idea of Western democracy from being undermined. This promoted the interests of Western powers for global influence. At the same time, the Eurocentric narratives justified the wars through the psychological effects of exposure to war violence that is inflicted upon the morally injured soldiers (with their own acts of violence).

The self-oriented moral injury concerning the other’s suffering casts Western soldiers ‘not as perpetrators, but as victims of war devastation’ (68). One can also draw parallels to the present, where nation-states employ collective victimhood to gather solidarity and sentiments on a global level.

The self-oriented moral injury concerning the other’s suffering casts Western soldiers “not as perpetrators, but as victims of war devastation” (68). One can also draw parallels to the present, where nation-states employ collective victimhood to gather solidarity and sentiments on a global level. The ongoing war inflicted on Palestine by Israel is a timely example where Israel has been claiming and performing victimhood to justify both direct and structural violence against Palestinians. In this case, it is used to sustain a feeling of entitlement and global solidarity in destroying the “other”. Today, Israel continues to bomb the civilians and children in Gaza as the International Court of Justice, based at The Hague in the Netherlands, has been examining the issue since the beginning of last year at the request of the UN General Assembly.

How did populist discourse mobilise the languages of pain in its communication of pandemic suffering?

Subsequently, Chapter Three focuses on the populist weaponisation of victimhood in the recent pandemic in the Anglo-American context. The author asks a crucial question here: How did populist discourse mobilise the languages of pain in its communication of pandemic suffering? By “normalisation,” the anti-lockdown activists downplayed the increasing threat of the virus to maintain a sense of uninterrupted continuity in people’s everyday lives. In the context of authoritarian populism in the UK and the US, the work points out the dislocation of two kinds of suffering: the systemic suffering experienced by the classed, racialised, and gendered groups most likely vulnerable to the virus and tactical suffering, claimed primarily by anti-lockdown activists and far-right libertarians (82). Even though mortality rates among Black men were the highest of all social groups, Black women were the most vulnerable as they are disproportionately represented as “essential” or “frontline” workers and so more at risk of contagion, yet at the same time they “often lack job security,”. Delineating these two kinds of suffering is crucial in comprehending how victimhood is weaponised to serve particular political, social, or economic interests, often at the expense of the actual victims.

The final chapter, ‘How Can Victimhood Be Reclaimed?’, sets on a quest to explore how victimhood can benefit the structurally oppressed.

The final chapter, “How Can Victimhood Be Reclaimed?”, sets on a quest to explore how victimhood can benefit the structurally oppressed. The work sets out recommendations for public discourse to go beyond the politics of pain and its affective responses to suffering, empathy, and anger by combining these emotions with collectivist narratives of justice, mainly focusing on the oppressed. Claims of victimhood are claims to power; hence, the author calls the readers to understand why we should feel or engage with a particular kind of suffering and, where needed. One can do this by asking a few crucial questions: Who is the victim and perpetrator in a specific narrative around victimhood? Which social positions (of class, gender, race, sexuality, ability) do the actors of suffering occupy? Who is silenced in the process of claiming victimhood? (126).

The work’s intensely researched case studies are devoted to understanding the idea of emotional capitalism. The book explores how colonial legacies are defined by colonial histories of power that selectively attach the value of the victim to selves and how they selectively choose to forget the “other’s” victimhood. Consequently, emotional capitalism emerges as masculinist and Eurocentric by tactically leaving the racialised outside the remit of memory and emotion, reproducing neocolonial hierarchies of suffering. The white narrative reconciliation in the American Civil War argued that White men suffered as they fought, suffered as they killed, killed as they protected, and the absolute disregard for collateral damage in both Iraq and Afghanistan as the Western militaries waged war on so-called humanitarian grounds namely, to protect civilians from the Taliban, are examples of wars waged to promote the interests of Western powers for regional influence and global control. Chouliaraki’s work is essential to the literature on public culture and the idea of emotions that play out in the public discourse. When Chouliaraki discusses the “wronging” of the weaponisation of victimhood, which injured specific communities unjustly, she addresses the Eurocentric languages of pain – trauma and rights – establishing its suffering as more legitimate than that of the other.

In the era of far-right populism on a global level, this work contributes significantly to the body of work examining the hyperemotional nature of politics and the performance of victimhood (77) in our times. With the discourse of suffering masculine white soldiers at war comes the racial forgetting of pain: fixating on the pain of the powerful while neglecting the vulnerable “others”. The work draws a parallel to racialised victimhood by further analysing the silencing of Black and Brown soldiers and, later, of non-white civilians from the global South.

With the discourse of suffering masculine white soldiers at war comes the racial forgetting of pain: fixating on the pain of the powerful while neglecting the vulnerable ‘others’.

Similarly, in Chouliaraki’s book The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism, she examines how stories where famine is described through the white’s own experience of dieting. It further attempts to read the contemporary idea of solidarity, which has today become not about vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning the public into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering. At the same time, in the work Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, the author does not dismiss the idea of pain in the politics of justice. Instead, the author calls the readers to ask critical questions in analysing victimhood in any political discourse: who has the privilege of voice, who can establish their suffering as dominant and so as “true,” and ultimately, who can benefit from speaking out on their pain over the pain of others – whether in public discourse, or collective memory. Chouliaraki’s text is a powerful and urgent warning to readers about the culture of victimhood in contemporary times.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Pack-Shot on Shutterstock.