Albena Azmanova (AA): in your new book Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, you observe that victimhood has today become one of the most potent political vocabularies in our culture. But haven’t claims to suffered injustice been always a powerful strategy? What is new?

Lilie Chouliaraki (LC): Grievances of suffered injustice have been typically raised by leftist political actors, and the political right has reproached them for strategically ‘playing the victimhood card’. However, of recent, right-wing populists have turned the tables: they have adopted the claim of victimhood as a central strategy. This is the starting point of the book. Far-right populists that tend to castigate, ignore or even mock the suffering of marginalized groups or vulnerable social actors, while they use the rhetoric of the victimized people to win voters over and promote themselves as a charismatic saviour to gain popularity and win elections. Donald Trump is a textbook case of this phenomenon.

 

AA: The paradoxical development of far-right populism hijacking the language of the Left is just the entry point of your book. In order to show how and why this is the case, as well as to explore the consequences of this development, you offer a panoramic history of the idea of the victim in late modernity and an analysis of the present uses of victimhood in western societies. What is the differentia specifica in the way the far Right uses claims to victimhood? 

LC: For those parties and actors that advocate the protection of vulnerable communities and minoritized groups, it makes much sense to draw on these groups’ experiences of emotional pain or social marginalization or oppression and to speak out on their suffering as a cause for action. Social movements have been doing precisely this, from the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century to Black Lives Matter and MeToo in our century. But what we are seeing today (as we have also seen in the past with dire results) is that the far Right makes a masterful use of victimhood not to protect the vulnerable and marginalized in society but to benefit themselves: the leader, the party and the interests of the few. Just look at the number of billionaires rallying around Trump, Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and his policies of minimal tax for the rich and no welfare for the poor. Same with the economic elites that supported Brexit in the UK. 

The weaponization of victimhood: the instrumental appropriation of claims to pain by political actors who neither speak from positions of systemic vulnerability nor serve the vulnerable in society

This is what I call the weaponization of victimhood: the instrumental appropriation of claims to pain by political actors who neither speak from positions of systemic vulnerability nor serve the vulnerable in society with a view to stirring strong emotions and achieving recognition and domination for themselves. One recent example of the far-right weaponization of victimhood is Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. His keyword has been “denazification.” Ukrainians were cast as “nazis” who needed to be exterminated for threatening his country – thereby evoking complex histories of past victimhood while conveniently ignoring that contemporary Ukraine is a democratic state where the far Right has growing but limited power. The west as an ally of Ukraine also posed a threat to Russia, they were also perpetrators in Putin’s language. In this rhetoric, the Russian army was “on a peacekeeping mission”, fighting to keep their country safe –  just as they did in the ‘Great Patriotic War”. Putin here uses “denazification” to vilify Ukraine and evoke a glorious past of mass sacrifice for his nation, presenting today’s Russia as a noble victim that defends itself with the same defiance as its victorious predecessors. Putin, in other words, is weaponizing victimhood so as to justify his illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine and to legitimize his imperialist geopolitical agenda.

 

AA:  In contrast to quests for justice that engage the imagery of broader societal ideals of welfare, claims to victimhood have been the last resort of the weak. What allows nowadays those in positions of power — the powerful and the privileged — to claim victimhood?

LC: It is true that victimhood has historically been used as a last resort of the weak. Starting roughly in the mid to late 19th century, there is a long history to the birth of the contemporary vocabulary of victimhood, which developed precisely in order to speak about the suffering of the weak and the vulnerable. In this history, I trace down two main languages of pain:  trauma and human rights. Trauma spoke about those who are broken emotionally, and I speak in detail about how the horrific violence of 20th century wars contributed to a growing acceptance of psychological trauma as a pervasive condition of the modern self. And rights arose through this same history to protect those who are socially vulnerable, all those who are exposed to social forms of violence whether such violence is related to war, to extreme poverty and destitution, to misogyny, to racist aggression and discrimination, and more recently also to violence and discrimination because of sexual orientation or body shape and ability – this is a history associated not only with the major social movements of the 20th century, as I already said, but also with the gradual institutionalisation of human rights in global politics particularly in the post-WWII order.

This historical excursion notwithstanding, no vocabulary belongs to one social group alone, and communication has always been a site of contestation and struggle over whose voice is stronger and whose message is dominant. Victimhood is a particularly attractive weapon in these communication struggles because of the emotional value and the ethico-political impact that claiming to be a victim generates today – partly due to this history of institutionalized diffusion of the languages of pain (trauma and rights). It is because of this that today we see actors vying in public for who is the bigger victim and who deserves more outpouring of emotion or recognition for their suffering. In this struggle, those who have more power – meaning more economic, political, cultural capital – go further than others. They are the ones with the access to power, the broad visibility, the louder voice, the priming of algorithms and so their victimhood and their emotions tend to dominate in the public sphere. Claiming to be wronged on social media platforms, in particular, tends to generate some of the highest volumes of emotional engagement, typically anger and outrage from the far Right and this is because social media platforms push emotional content to monetize engagement. But, beyond virality, there is a series of other, longer-term societal developments, like the rise of therapy culture and emo-talk or the marketization and mediatization of politics, that have made political communication much more emotional today and made victimhood a central element in how political actors assert themselves and seek recognition and domination in public. And this why the pain of the underprivileged, which has little or no access to the public sphere, requires collective mobilization, co-ordinated action and sustained effort both online and offline in order to be heard and recognized in public – as the Black Lives Matter movement showed in 2020 (and throughout the past decade). 

 

AA: In the book you are talking about a “reversal of victimhood”, where the perpetrator tries to pose as a victim. What exactly is the mechanism here? 

A good way to challenge the reversal of victimhood that the far-Right so expertly uses is to ask the question who is absent? Who is not talked about? Who is silenced in this conversation? 

LC: Yes, the reversal of victimhood refers to the strategic inversion of the relations of victimhood between those who inflict pain and those who suffer that pain so that the perpetrators style themselves as victims for their own purposes. One example of reverse victimhood that I use in the book is the back-rolling of reproductive rights in the U.S. When in 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by Donald Trump, overturned Roe vs Wade, and essentially took away women’s right to abortion, the main argument was that the foetus is “innocent unborn life” that has the right to be defended – and in Europe, despite the EU’s renewed commitment to the right to abortion, many far-right parties also call for restrictions on abortion rights. Their argument? “Defend life, from its conception until its natural end.” 

There are two things I want to point out with respect to those arguments. Firstly, the rhetoric of “unborn life” as an actual “person” and a “person” who has “rights” (one of the two languages of pain) casts the foetus as a potential sufferer. A sufferer who has the right to be defended. Secondly, this same rhetoric turns those who decide to have an abortion into perpetrators. By depriving the foetus of their right to exist, women who seek abortion are simultaneously seen to commit violence – in fact, nothing less than murder. Note here that the foetus did not have “person” status in U.S. legislation until the recent Supreme Court decision to grant it one – an act that was instrumental in presenting abortion as a form of violence that needed to be stopped and women as perpetrators that needed to be punished.  How does this reversal in the relations of victimhood work? It basically turns the control of women’s bodies by Evangelical Christians and misogynists of the American far Right into an emotional cause that legitimizes as benefactors those who took back one of the most profound legal victories for women’s reproductive rights in the 20th century. 

A good way to challenge the reversal of victimhood that the far- Right so expertly uses is to ask the question who is absent? Who is not talked about? Who is silenced in this conversation? What is missing from the far-right use of victimhood is the claim that women themselves are the only victims of abortion bans. There is extensive and long-term scientific research that demonstrates in detail the health-related harms and social harms that women who have not had access to safe abortion options suffer – from gynaecological and emotional trauma to poverty, unemployment  and further marginalization – especially women from impoverished and marginalized backgrounds. 

But perhaps the bigger point about this example is that victimhood does not work as a single word but sets in motion a whole vocabulary of blame and praise that slots different actors into positions of “enemy” and ‘friend” and rallies people around these positions. What I mean is that, in announcing the victim, at the same time, we also attach responsibility to those actors who surround the victim: those who inflict pain on the victim, or the perpetrator and enemy, and those who alleviate the pain of the victim, or the benefactor and friend. Victimhood is, in this sense, a whole vocabulary of suffering that conjures up a choreography of actors and puts value onto them according to what role they play in the political narrative at hand. Who is the sufferer? Who is the evil-doer? Who is the benefactor? Who is responsible for the harm? Who helped the victim? All these are important questions to ask when we hear far-right politicians, or indeed any politician, play the victimhood card. It is just that the far Right is making expert use of the vocabulary of the victim in their politics around the world. 

 

AA: You note that the nefarious political work in the instrumentalization of victimhood is to grant validity to claims to suffering made by powerful voices while silencing the grievances of the less powerful speaking out about their suffering. How does victimhood hold such validating or legitimizing power over those who claim it for themselves?

Communicating pain is political

LC: One of the reasons why victimhood is such a key vocabulary in our politics and culture today is because victimhood speaks to something that we consider universal: pain. Everyone feels pain. And everyone feels for those who are in pain. This feeling for the victim and expressing empathy with the victim is inherent to our self-description as citizens of late modern democracies of the west since the Enlightenment, particularly its Scottish legacy on the centrality of moral sentiments in western public spheres. In this legacy, we have all gone through some form of pain/trauma or some form of injustice that we want to see corrected. We all recognize the emotions of anger for those who have done wrong or compassion for those who suffer and gratitude or solidarity with those who help the victims. And so we do not usually think that there is politics – an insidious agenda — in hearing about people’s pain, in expressing pain or in supporting other people’s pain. But we need to challenge the idea that victimhood is not political, and that because we all feel pain, pain cannot be used as a tool for gaining power. 

Communicating pain is political. And the fact that claims to victimhood somehow speak to our common experience of feeling pain, our shared humanity so to speak, hides the relations of power wherefrom those who speak of victimhood already occupy in society. In this sense, the question “who is silenced in this conversation?” can reveal quite a lot about the social struggles at play when specific claims to victimhood are made in the public sphere. Often we see that those political actors who speak loud and clear about victimhood are those who already possess some form of legitimacy or capital that enables them to be heard. The far Right across Europe and the world, as we already know, have a whole disinformation industry of malignant actors and professional trolls who spread hate speech, division and outrage online against every ‘enemy’ that stands in their way all the while claiming that they are victimized. A case in point is that of  the  Algerian boxing athlete, Imane Khelif, who won the women’s 66kg final in the 2024 Olympic Games, and who was accused of being “a man beating up women” and “had to be suspended from the games”. This threw into relief the strong grip that far-right voices of victimhood can have in global conversations when they set the agenda of who suffers and deserves empathy and who is a perpetrator and deserves punishment in our culture. 

On the other end of the spectrum, those systemically vulnerable, the migrants, the low-wage workers, the racial/ethnic minorities, people-in-need in the global South remain mostly silent, marginalized or doubted in their words; or spoken for or about by other more powerful actors.  That’s why for vulnerable groups, it takes a whole social movement to be heard, as I already mentioned, or, wherever possible, it takes serious legal representation – as in Khelif’s case who filed a criminal complaint over alleged “acts of cyber-harassment” at the end of the 2024 Olympic games.

As I have shown both in this and in my previous work, The Spectatorship of Suffering, which dealt with how news journalists portray distant suffering on our screens,  it is important to ask how reporters in crisis zones, whether in disaster or conflict, employ the vocabulary of victimhood, who is portrayed as a victim, who is a perpetrator and who the benefactor, who is overreported and who is underreported, whose voice is heard and whose silenced, whose lives matter and whose are dehumanized – I mean how reporting plays out its own politics of pain, can tell us something really important about the geopolitical and moral norms that inform the practices and narratives of news organisations in the first place. Personally, I believe that it is urgent that we continue asking questions like these because, every time someone is presented as a victim and someone else as perpetrator, a certain vision of social order is being affirmed and a certain hierarchy of human lives is legitimised. But equally every time a dominant narrative of victimhood is challenged, that social order is challenged as well, and that hierarchy of lives is also challenged.

 

AA: Shouldn’t we also worry that labelling someone as a victim is deeply disempowering – adding insult to injury, so to speak. Much as the label of a victim  attracts compassion and desire for help, it can also be denigrating. “Bestowing victimhood’ to certain groups can also be a strategy of self-empowerment for entrenched political elites. As I have argued in this symposium, in conditions of ubiquitous precarity, “various minorities are competing for victimhood, as this is the only apparent avenue to social protection, while ruling elites source their power from the patronage they bestow to select minorities.” How do you propose to solve this conundrum? 

LC: That’s right. In the book I emphasize the point that being a victim should not be taken as an objective, stable identity of a person or something that each person carries inside them, but it is an act of speech or something the person communicates about themselves. This distinction is not meant to deny anyone’s lived experience of being a victim. I do not mean to make judgments on how individual people actually feel. Nor do I encourage an attitude of denying any individual person their pain by saying “you are just saying you are a victim, but you are obviously not”. We can never know the depths of a person’s emotional pain nor preclude that they feel hurt by the circumstances of their lives. Any such attitude would have been immoral, and my own approach has nothing to do with that. 

The value of the distinction between victimhood as claim and vulnerability as a condition is not to produce a rigid schema where each one of us is boxed in depending on their salary scale or their gender identity

What I think is important, however, is that we start thinking more critically about victimhood and its relationship to vulnerability. The two are different. While victimhood is an act of speech, vulnerability is a condition of the self. Vulnerability, in other words, has to do with the personal and social circumstances through which someone experiences life and how such circumstances may expose persons to various forms of violence or shield them for such violence – their circumstances of economic safety or precarity (class), of gender or race dynamics that may constrain them through misogynist or racist prejudice, of their sexuality and how this might fit within dominant norms or marginalize them, or the range of abilities and wellbeing they enjoy and how far these support them or hold them back as human beings. 

The value of the distinction between victimhood as claim and vulnerability as a condition is not to produce a rigid schema where each one of us is boxed in depending on their salary scale or their gender identity. That would be a dogmatic way of approaching the question of pain and suffering that is distinct for each individual and includes various degrees and combinations of emotional and social harm. 

What the distinction does, however, is that it draws our attention to the politics that lie behind claims like “I am a victim, we are wronged” – what I earlier called “the politics of pain”. This is an emotional politics of communication that invites us to feel for the pain of the victim and, in focusing on the feeling for the pain, systematically obscures where exactly these claims come from, what position of vulnerability (or privilege) they may be spoken from. Instead of taking these claims at face value and responding emotionally because of our prior commitments, the wish to go viral or simply as an emotional reflex, it would be best if we pause for a minute and look at where exactly each of these claims are coming from. Look at the historical and structural context where people speak from and think about how far this context that they occupy exposes them to which forms of violence or shelters them from other forms of violence. And when I say violence, I mean both physical violence and social violence: harms that come because of who people are in terms of their gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, age – or any intersection of those. 

To use myself as a hypothetical example, as a white female middle-class professor with an invisible disability, I am relatively sheltered from, say, class or race-related violence even though I am open to certain forms of gender-related, ableist and perhaps also ageist discrimination. My lived vulnerability, however, becomes victimhood only at the moment that I decide to articulate in public speech the exclusions or discriminations that I might have suffered because, say, of being a woman. In my case, the two, my vulnerabilities and my speech on gender discrimination would overlap, in which case, I would have used my voice to announce my suffering and protest in public. As I have already said, this overlap between people announcing their vulnerability through specific claims to victimhood is something that historically oppressed and marginalised groups have always done – take the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter and others. They use victimhood to speak out on the systemic forms of suffering they embody or experience. But as we all know, the two – structural forms of vulnerability and claims to victimhood – do not always overlap. Let’s get back to Trump. From his rape trial to his fraud trial, to his impeachment on the January 6th insurrection, he has always claimed to be the victim, the one persecuted rather than the persecutor. His suffering here is not systemic but tactical – it is an identity that does not articulate vulnerability but is put forward for the purposes of political and personal gain. This unstable coupling of vulnerability  and victimhood  is at the heart of the politics of pain that is ubiquitous in our culture today. How exactly forms of vulnerability and claims to victimhood come together – and so who they present as a victim deserving recognition and who they do not – is one of the most important political questions of our time. 

 

AA: Are you saying that the powerful cannot suffer? In Capitalism on Edge, I claim that the affluent and the socially privileged can also be victims of precarity and of the ecological trauma – harms incurred by capitalism’s profit motive; in this sense they are also victims of systemic injustice. How do we adjudicate between valid and abusive grievances of suffered injustice, between what you call ‘tactical’ and ‘systemic’ suffering? What is our gauge? 

LC: I agree that it would be wrong to a priori deprive anyone of their use of victimhood for whichever purposes they may wish to use it. For instance, Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court judge who was accused of attempted rape by Christine Blaisey Ford back in 2018, has as much right to claim that he is a victim of a smearing campaign against his name as much as Blaisey Ford has to claim she has been the victim of sexual assault by him. 

What I think is important to do, however, is to stop engaging in emotional debates or angry contests about who is the “real” victim in this or in any case – in many cases, we cannot even decide on the “truth” of victimhood because indeed both sides can feel “real” in the pain. Instead, we could introduce critical judgment that pushes us to think beyond our pre-existing prejudices and attachments. This means asking questions not about real or fake victims but about the game of power that is played out in the case at hand, and who is actually harmed by which forms of violence. 

It is important to have a language that delinks claims to victimhood from structural vulnerability or oppression

The starting point for this kind of questioning is to remember that when we speak of victimhood, we do not necessarily talk about vulnerability – about systemic exposure to various forms of social violence – but we talk about the communicative power of speaking out and being heard. In other words, what matters is what kinds of power those who claim victimhood hold and how far that power grants them privileges in terms of institutional authority, moral legitimacy and believability. To go back to the Kavanaugh example, as a white cis man, Yale graduate and prominent Republican Judge, Kavanaugh was indeed believed by those who had the power to vote him onto the U.S. Supreme Court as an associate justice, despite Blaisey Ford’s testimony but also the testimonies of three more women – testimonies that the FBI “failed” to investigate further during the Trump administration. A few years later, as a member of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh was one of those who voted for the overturning of Roe vs Wade, depriving millions of women of their right to make decisions about their own bodies.

My point is that the stand-off of victimhood between Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford cannot be decided on the basis of fake or true victimhood. Both people can feel pain, both can claim they are victims. What I want to add in the conversation is that it would be more productive to approach their stand-off from the perspective of power. As an unequal struggle between claims to pain, where harm inflicted upon a woman systemically open to patriarchal violence (as a sixteen-year-old girl at a party and as a female academic and adult witness at the Senate stand) is conflated with the personal grievance (for having to face an accusation) of a man with superior social and political power and male entitlement (to sex as a young man and to Supreme Court candidacy, now membership, as a middle-aged man). 

The bigger point here is that, when we are confronted with claims to pain, instead of rushing to take sides and emotionally connect with this or that victim, it would be better if we paused for a minute and asked questions that bring the broader context into the picture: 

• Who holds systemic forms of power in this context? 
• Who has historically been exercising which forms of power over whom? 
• What kinds of identities and actions do claims to victimhood legitimize? Who lines up with whom? 
• Whose pain is recognized and acted upon by whom? 
• And whose pain is not? Whose pain remains silent? And why? 

I think politically, at a moment when the far-right and more broadly racist, misogynist, neocolonial forces and groups – almost everywhere in the world in the global North and the global South, are coming to power or are close to coming to power in the name of victims and of the oppressed – it is really important to have a language that delinks the two – claims to victimhood from structural vulnerability or oppression. And to see what they say for what it is: a politics of pain that aims at those already being privileged securing more privilege and those who are already vulnerable – poor, marginalised, vilified – not just remaining in their place but suffering even more. 

 

AA: How about the risk  of turning the heuristics of victimhood into a dogmatic schema of sociological categories, as for instance when the struggles against discrimination become institutionalised into programmes and policies? I have in mind the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion programmes that list a number of ‘protected identities’ while obscuring other forms of discrimination. 

LC: My argument is not that the critical questioning of victimhood should be a matter of ticking boxes off a sociological grid: class, gender, race etc. My aim is to question why, in our current emotional contests and divisions over who is a victim, we do not take into account the circumstances of vulnerability from which claims to pain are made? 

I also argue that taking into account the various intersecting forms of vulnerability and privilege that people inhabit as they speak out on being victims can produce richer and subtler accounts of victimhood. Such accounts can also help us challenge common-sense ideas, such as that there is a “pure victim” and a “pure perpetrator”; or the idea that victimhood is a zero-sum game, if I am a victim you are not.  And they highlight that victimhood is a continuum of positions from abject vulnerability (marginalised communities, people living in occupied territories, refugees) to relative shelter from most forms of violence (upper middle-and-upper white men largely in the west) – and claims to victimhood may fall at any point across that continuum. 

Far from being dogmatic, these accounts challenge yet another common-sense idea, namely that if you are a victim (if you make a claim to victimhood in public) you automatically deserve empathy and support. No, we need to look beyond the claim and the emotion and the immediate response. We need not take the concept at face value, “oh this is a victim.” Instead, we need to do some thinking to work out who speaks from which position and in which specific ways their position of relative privilege or vulnerability exposes them to which forms of violence and harm to and to which effects. Of course, understanding victimhood is not an exact science. It is an interpretative exercise. So, it is not going to help us find the perfect victim – that is not the point. But we can at least have a method to evaluate how relative privilege and relative vulnerability shape the circumstances and balances of power at work in each context where a politics of pain is at play. 

 

AA: What is the one shift that urgently needs to be made in the way our societies address injustice? 

In our culture – a culture of neoliberal capitalism and the dominance of platforms, claims to victimhood are usually individualised.

LC: One of the main themes that run throughout the book and are there implicit in everything I said earlier is that, in our culture – a culture of neoliberal capitalism and the dominance of platforms, claims to victimhood are usually individualised, that is people speak out about their own personal truth, their own experience of pain. And, even when this experience is added up to make an online movement like MeToo and pushes for institutional change, the whole culture behind this still promotes individualised and commercialised solutions to social problems: whether it is the empowerment of postfeminism – that is completely tied up with consumerist choice and the promotional culture of big brands (feminist logos on Chanel t-shirts, for instance) – or the self-care industry of mindfulness and healthy living among others – which is again another mega industry of profit-making of an emerging class of gurus of well-being. 

What is missing from all this is a focus not on online victims, popular victims in our politics and culture but on structural vulnerability – on the forms of violence that some individuals and groups endure because the various personal and social circumstances that they find themselves in do not protect them enough from those forms of violence.  We live in times of unprecedented inequalities: yes, there are institutional improvements, there has been progress in terms of recognition and inclusion, but this is not enough while questions of redistribution remain unresolved. Thomas Pikkety claims that, in terms of income inequalities, we are coming full circle to a moment in time, when global inequalities seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century. 

So, structural vulnerability is a matter not of victimhood but of injustice. And, in this sense, we need not individualised claims to pain that single out this or that issue but collective narratives that combine the appeal to emotion with explicit justifications about why and how, on the basis of the justification offered, we need to reform or transform the conditions of the structurally vulnerable who are implicated in the claims. A move from individualistic explanations of social suffering towards concerted action that can transform the conditions of suffering in the first place and collective struggles against organized systems of oppression, capitalism, patriarchy, and structural racism.

 

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Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Chouliaraki’s latest book is Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood.