Constructing victimhood: beyond innocence and guilt in transitional justice

This book seeks to go ‘beyond innocence and guilt’ to expand the criminological, victimological, and transitional justice imagination with regard to who we ‘see’ as victims, what we ‘hear’ as experiences of victimisation, and who makes these determinations. The book argues that the construction, reproduction, and politicisation of victimhood is structured not only by notions of innocence and guilt and the existence of complex victims, but by larger questions concerning the existence of hierarchies of victimhood, the exercise of voice and agency, the role of silence and the silencing of certain variants of victimhood, the presence of victimhood in the physical landscape, and the haunting impact of unresolved legacies of violent conflict. By failing to cast the transitional justice gaze more widely, this book argues that it is not only the ‘voices in the cracks’ that will be collapsed but entire experiences of victimhood and victimisation. Moreover, if transitional justice is to live up to its claims of being ‘victim-centred’, widening its conceptual and practical boundaries to recognise the multiple and overlapping variables that construct and reproduce understandings of victimhood is essential. Pursing this line of enquiry, this book aims to make a step-change in the understanding of victimhood in post-conflict and transitional contexts.