Several scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.

Over the last thirty years, post-structuralist, feminist and other IR theorists have asked questions of the ways in which discourses on sovereignty seek to foreclose political possibility. To do so, they have advanced a decentralised, contested, incomplete and relational understanding of politics that presupposes some sort of (fragmented) intersubjective agency. There is one site, however, that appears to confound this line of argument insofar as it is commonly understood to exemplify an entirely nonrelational, anti-political 'desolation': the concentration camp. Drawing on feminist theory to establish the terms of an aesthetic mode of 'interruption', this paper will identify a compelling challenge to this position in a comic book drawn by Horst Rosenthal, a German-Jewish detainee at Gurs in Vichy France who was later killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rosenthal's piece will be read as an 'aesthetic interruption' that mounts a powerful critique of the logic underpinning his concentrationary experience, and in so doing demonstrates one way in which (to however painfully limited a degree) the political might be 'brought back in' to discussions about sovereign power.

A series of reflections on Covid-19 that looks at: how the pandemic affects processes of bordering and increases the indeterminate grey zones within which so many people are forced to live; the way nurses are presented in the media and the hypocrisy of praising them in a moment of crisis while simultaneously devaluing their work and underpaying them; health inequalities in Newham; the inequalities in the craft sector spotlighted by the pandemic; the relationships between radical neighbourliness and local politics; how perceptions of time have been affected during lockdown - and how 24-7 capitalism may seek to take advantage of this radical reorganisation of time.

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This Symposium arose out of a set of conversations that began all the way back in 2020. We would like to thank all of the contributors for their care, attention and input throughout this period. Our thanks are also due to Polity's editorial team, whose constructive, critical feedback improved this introduction immeasurably. Finally, our names are listed in alphabetical order by surname. Equal authorship is implied.Questions about who can and cannot be considered a victim permeate almost all efforts to describe, map, legislate, resist and/or dismantle harms both specific and systemic in nature.Discourses of victimhood inform individual, group and national identities, shape peacebuilding and transitional justice programmes, and set the boundaries of debate about migration, sex work, crime, empire and much else besides. 1 These formations are not wholly specific to our present moment, of course: Alyson Cole has described how the 1970s "war on welfare" identified "victimists" unwilling or unable to adopt neoliberal postures of self-reliance, pitting them against "anti-victimist" conservatives who themselves claimed to be threatened by a feminised system of political correctness. 2 Nevertheless, in recent years victimhood has been prominently weaponised as part of a rising tide of anti-genderism, nativism, white supremacy,