Community Members’ Theorization of Their Collective Victimization

Abstract

Focusing on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, this chapter examines collective influences on individual theorizing about collective victimization more generally, and Islamophobia specifically. The authors argue that the theorization of collective victimhood is a topic of debate within communities, involving arguments about the breadth and inclusivity of the community and the meaning of culturally shared and identity-relevant narratives. For example, the authors explore how arguments as to how Muslims should make sense of their experience of victimization draw on different interpretations of Qur’anic text. Throughout, the authors discuss the two-way relationship between constructions of victimhood and individual experience, and how different ways of theorizing intergroup relations result in different understandings of the nature of group members’ victimization and how they should respond. The authors’ approach highlights the importance of a contextualized, culturally embedded analysis of how collective victimhood is understood and theorized.

Collective victimhood and conflict-related attitudes: A meta-analysis

“…The different direction of the impact of inclusive and non-inclusive understandings of collective victimhood reinforces the attention increasingly paid to how group members make sense of collective victimhood (e.g., Hopkins and Dobai 2020;Leach 2020;. Additional research on this front could help understand collective sense-making processes and investigate how to facilitate the development of inclusive understandings of collective victimhood.…”

A social identity analysis of ingroup norms, trauma, and justice: The intergenerational experiences of Albanian dictatorship survivors.

“…This reflects our findings regarding our participants’ perceptions of powerlessness and can, at least in part, explain their concern about how the historical perpetrators threaten present-day and future democracy. Past research has also highlighted the role played by religious identities in helping survivors to understand the nature of their victimization (Hopkins & Dobai, 2020). Here, the present study expands on this by showing that family injunctive norms can facilitate the understanding, transmission, and enactment of religious norms and values.…”

On the Misrecognition of Identity: Muslims' Everyday Experiences in Scotland

“…Here, it is important to note that as none of the authors are Muslim, we had no personal experience of the particular forms of misrecognition participants reported. However, our reading of these data was informed by the literature on Islamophobia and the importance of taking its experience seriously (Hopkins & Dobai, 2019; Rehman & Hanley, 2022).…”