Rodrigo Muñoz-González and Ignacio Siles of the University of Costa Rica reflect on some of the key themes of LSE’s Lilie Chouliaraki’s latest book.

Who are the victims of society? This question has been central in the social sciences for almost a century, focused on the consequences of different structures in individual lives. It does not only entail identifying injured identities and bodies, but it requires understanding how certain persons, communities, and social groups consider themselves victims of some action or event.

In her powerful new book Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood (2024), Lilie Chouliaraki helps us navigate our contemporary mediascape, which is characterised by multiple claims of victimhood made by multiple social actors, from political activists to right-wing politicians. She goes beyond signalling who has a justified right to claim it, and seeks to problematise how power imbalances and structural constraints are key components of the social articulation of victimhood.

Written in clear and engaging prose, this book sheds light on current scholarly and political dilemmas, examining the discourses enacted from social movements in the United States and the United Kingdom such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Chouliaraki’s analysis delves into the ways in which these movements’ claims, emerging from situations of systemic inequalities, have been confronted by reactionary and conservative narratives that cast doubts about their main premises. This is the case, for instance, of public denunciations of sexual abuse who are often met with scepticism in public life and the media. In this respect, this book examines how right-wing and powerful figures and groups develop discursive tactics to describe themselves as victims in situations where they have been accused or denounced of wrongdoings.

The articulation and experience of victimhood

Chouliaraki explores how victimhood is currently articulated in diverse discourses and media practices and how this brings about unequal power dynamics. This is done successfully by dissecting victimhood as a cultural problem with historical roots, contemporary forms (especially when it is appropriated by populist rhetoric), and as an issue that must be reclaimed based on a sense of social justice. As such, Chouliaraki unpacks the experience of being a victim. She distinguishes between systemic and tactical suffering; that is to say, between suffering as a condition lassoed to structural circumstances and as a claim adopted by persons or communities for their advantage. Chouliaraki argues that victimhood must not be understood as a universal quality, “but rather as a communicative act participating in a certain kind of politics” (p. 27). This means that the way victimhood is expressed and experienced depends on different contexts and even goals associated to political agendas.

Victimhood, then, is closely related to politics of pain: strong emotional reactions to spectacles of suffering without considering the reasons behind it. This kind of politics also entail competing struggles for recognition in which specific privileges and power relations end up promoting who can finally speak up––especially in current mediascapes, in a dynamic Chouliaraki calls the “platformisation of pain”. In this dynamic, different social and political groups who have a dominant role in society seek to expose their suffering, whilst other more vulnerable communities cannot aspire to be properly heard.

Predominantly White suffering

Wronged provocatively explores how the historical emergence of the Western self as a suffering individual derived from hegemonic positions––i.e., mostly White and European perspectives. To this end, Chouliaraki contends that victimhood has been discursively constructed as a zero-sum game in which only one type of sufferer is positioned as the worthy victim. With this in mind, the main wars that have occurred in the West during the last two centuries are analysed as events that shaped how suffering is comprehended. For instance, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars are explored as instances where soldiers experienced moral injuries. These injuries derived from the actions of harming or killing those who in principle need to be protected. In these cases, suffering is located in the hands of the soldier who shot a rifle against a civilian, and not in the civilian who received the attack. For Chouliaraki, the crux of the matter dwells on how suffering is articulated as an exclusive domain of white male soldiers, overall neglecting Black and Brown experiences and other gendered and classed identities.

Populist victimhood

One important contribution of the book is the analysis of the modes in which far-right groups claim to be victims. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Chouliaraki unpacks three strategies of populist victimhood deployed in the US and the UK––but which can easily be identified in other parts of the world:

• First, normalisation implies downplaying the increasing threat of the virus in the form of euphemisms, behavioral modelling, or institutional classifications.
• Second, militarisation comprises a metaphorical way of speaking about the pandemic as a war which de-emotionalises people’s suffering but, simultaneously, re-emotionalises the experience through a new antagonism against several actors, from migrants to public-health experts and measures.
• Third, obfuscation consists of confusing people’s understanding of how the pandemic was institutionally managed by disseminating false or misleading information with the intention of hiding government failures but also giving voice to far-right groups.

As Chouliaraki writes, these strategies operated as forms of mass gaslighting that distorted the experience of pain of different communities and groups––from minorities to frontline workers––while strengthening the power of populist leaders and avoiding any kind of accountability.

Indeed, Chouliaraki crafts a rigorous and compelling argument that helps us understand how victimhood is articulated through mediated discourses, historical conditions, and personal experiences. In this respect, this book entails a novel approach inasmuch it provides the reader with resources for cutting through the power relations embedded in claims to victimhood. By developing a strong normative framework, Wronged builds a ‘toolkit’ of social critique which aims to identify the linguistic tropes utilised by the far Right and other conservative groups to weaponise victimhood at the service of a microfascist politics of cruelty. With this, the goal is to raise awareness towards the common narratives employed by multiple populist movements. Furthermore, Chouliaraki develops a “heuristics of victimhood” whose objective is to orient us in the distinction between systemic and tactical suffering. This is one of the most remarkable points of the book as it provides clear guidelines for interrogating claims to victimhood and to translate the analysis to other contexts across the world.

Chouliaraki argues that it is time to reinvigorate our collective narratives of justice. This task involves highlighting the pain of those who suffer the most and turning it into calls for solidarity. In Wronged, academic readers will find a meticulously constructed analysis that provides analytical and normative resources to explore victimhood in diverse contexts and future research. Moreover, this book is a must in any political activist’s bookshelf as it gives insights for thinking about victimhood as a terrain of social struggle and strategy.

This article gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.