No abstract

No abstract

Narratives of wartime suffering, communist evils, and maltreatment by the 'West' have started featuring prominently in the political discourse across eastern Europe in the past decade and half. Permeating the public sphere, such narratives imply complex victimhood and often gain a hegemonic status. Why have such victimhood narratives become so pervasive? And what has been their purpose across eastern Europe? This interdisciplinary article provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how hegemonic narratives of victimhood have been used to enhance ontological security and as an instrument of power-seeking political leaders, especially (but not exclusively) right-wing populists. It shows that although the local attachment to memory and history is often portrayed as irrational, victimhood as a narrative has clear benefits regarding national ontological security as the self-understanding of a state and a tool to justify policies. Using concrete examples, the articles identify three main sub-narratives of direct, historical and structural victimhood linked to World War II, communism and the precarious relationship with the 'West', arguing that the combination of historical traumas and the post-1989 transformations explain the pan-regional proliferation of victimhood.

A growing trend in post-war transitional justice posits that structural conditions explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to survivors of war atrocities. While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across post-war states, they do not explain the great variance in which victims obtain compensation within post-war countries. Using the case of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a victim category that secured compensation in 2004, I present a new model to explain compensation using a rationalist approach. The paper shows that compensation adoption is primarily driven by an opportune combination of three factors: international salience (defined as the international attention given to the victim category and/or prioritisation of its demands), moral authority (defined as the level of perceived domestic deservingness for compensation) and mobilisation resources (defined as the victim category's capacities to mobilise and the quality of its networks). Drawing on fieldwork, this article shows that the prominence of the Srebrenica genocide propelled the issue of missing persons on to domestic and external agendas, affording the surviving families an opportunity to demand special compensation.

No abstract