Victims Who Have Done Nothing or Victims Who Have Done Nothing Wrong: Contesting Blame and ‘Innocent Victim’ Status in Transitioning Societies

Hearty, Kevin

doi:10.1093/bjc/azz017

Cited by 19 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Just as studying the discourse of victimisers can help TJ scholarship understand the nuances of how blame and victimhood are constructed and contested in post-conflict societies (Hearty, 2019), so too can engaging with the testimony of victims. The life stories of the wrongfully convicted show the willingness and ability of victims to recognise the messiness of victimhood and blame when ‘storying’ their own experiences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Inasmuch as Maguire (1994: 155) ‘sees’ herself as a victim of the state she also ‘sees’ herself as a victim of the IRA – a view shared by her son Patrick (Maguire, 2009: 331) who concludes that without a backdrop of IRA violence ‘we wouldn't have been nicked in the first place’. The willingness of the Maguires to blame the IRA reflects the nexus between personal politics and the attribution of blame for harms emanating from political violence (Hearty, 2019). Paddy Armstrong, who by contrast is more sympathetic towards Irish republicanism, affords the IRA greater moral slack.…”

Section: Storying Blamementioning

confidence: 99%

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Bringing narrative victimology to transitional justice: Blame, victimhood and life stories of wrongful conviction

Hearty

2021

European Journal of Criminology

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This article applies a narrative victimological lens of inquiry to the memoirs of those wrongfully convicted of high profile politically violent offences arising from the conflict in the North of Ireland. Using these life stories of wrongful conviction, the article critically examines how nuanced and complex understandings of victimhood and blame emerge from within victims’ own testimony. While on the one hand, victims can ‘story’ victimhood and blame in simplistic ways that echo dominant paradigms found within the criminological literature, at the same time they can ‘story’ victimhood and blame in more sophisticated ways that reflect complex debates found within the transitional justice literature. The ability to take both a more generous approach to victimhood that recognises the harm experienced by others and a more critically self-reflective approach of one's own culpability, it is submitted, shows the potential value that proposed oral history mechanisms have in allowing different perspectives on victimhood and blame to emerge from the testimony of those who suffered harms like wrongful conviction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Storying Blamementioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing narrative victimology to transitional justice: Blame, victimhood and life stories of wrongful conviction

Hearty

2021

European Journal of Criminology

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“…Similar commissions in Peru and El Salvador addressed the root causes of 'structural violence'. Although truth commissions as quasi-legal measures (Hayner, 2001) have been instrumental in repairing structures and instituting peace through truth-telling, they have been also criticized for failing to establish accountability and assign meaning to the victims' injuries and their personal necessity for redress. The ability of various types of reparation measures to successfully address individual human rights abuses, historical injustice, and systematic rights violations has significantly varied across time and place, in both its modality and its effectiveness.…”

Section: International Law and The History Of Reparationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A victim, similarly, is not only an individual, but also a social unit with a particular set of identities and ties to gender, ethnic, racial, or national origins (Arendt, 1951;Komar, 2008;Schafer, 1968: 33-91). Whereas criminologist Hans von Hentig (1948) developed a complex typology of 13 types of victims (one of whom is a 'socially weak victim' who lacks equality and faces racial prejudice because s/he threatens the capacities of the dominant culture), for contemporary scholars, victims can be innocent, thus challenging the traditional criminal justice frame where victimhood is hierarchically organized (Hearty, 2019).…”

Section: Who Is a Victim?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bosnian voices from the bottom of the well: Genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and victims’ right to remedies

Begicevic

2021

International Review of Victimology

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Human rights advocates call for reparation as an important step to acknowledge and repair historical injustice and mass harms. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims of war continue to seek monetary reparation for non-pecuniary damages caused by genocide: murder, injury to human body and dignity, and harms inflicted upon a close family member. They seek legal remedies using national, foreign, and international human rights judicial venues. Drawing from qualitative, ethnographic research data and archival documents, the article examines legal claims and public discourse regarding reparation and makes a case for a reconceptualization of reparation by including victim voices. The article concludes that despite being absent from the post-conflict victims’ reparation programs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, monetary reparation has assumed a social valuation attribute. On the one hand, it is a victim’s call for retributive, legal conceptions of justice – that someone who escaped international and national criminal justice programs pays. On the other hand, it is a tool to draw attention to Bosnian victims’ present civil and political exclusions that came with the international post-conflict peace treaty. While the post-war reconstruction focused on international trials, democratization, restorative justice, and state building programs, it also restricted socio-economic and cultural rights by redefining the citizenship and dismantling the welfare state. Reparation is a debt owed to victims.

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“…95 With respect to serious human rights violations, the language of law and criminality can provide cogent labels with which to denounce wrongdoing and to define understandings of victimhood, 96 even though as Hearty highlights it is erroneous to assume that 'criminal law is capable of capturing the full complexity of innocence and blame during conflict'. 97 The rhetorical power of law to condemn or commemorate has meant that Northern Ireland's metaconflict has included disputes over how human rights concepts should be understood and applied. For Unionists, this has included strongly resisting inclusive definitions of who can been considered a victim, while also seeking to apply the legal terminology of genocide and ethnic cleansing to repudiate specific actions of Republican paramilitaries during the conflict.…”

Section: A Deploying Legal Concepts To Buttress Metaconflict Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metaconflict and International Human Rights Law in Dealing With Northern Ireland’s Past

Mallinder

2019

SSRN Journal

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In many post-conflict societies, political actors battle to ensure the dominancy of their preferred narratives of the causes of and responsibilities for past violence. They wage these conflicts about the conflict to instrumentalise narratives of the past to serve their contemporary political aims, but in doing so, they contribute to the endurance of societal divisions which can have destructive effects on the promotion of reconciliation and political stability. Metaconflicts can be particularly heated with respect to the design and implementation of measures to deliver victims' rights to truth, justice, and reparations as it is through these processes that competing and complex communal narratives of the past are exposed and challenged. This article interrogates how metaconflicts shape political actors' engagement with or resistance to international legal obligations to investigate and prosecute past violations. The approaches of Northern Ireland's Unionist political parties and Unionist aligned organisations to the United Kingdom's obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights are used as a case study. Through, theoretical informed qualitative analysis of publicly available submissions made by these groups to an official consultation and parliamentary inquiries during 2018, this article identified four strategies used by Unionists to resist approaches to dealing with the past that they view as contrary to their interests. On this basis, the article argues that these actors understand law as a means to construct and provide official recognition for communally resonant moral and social categories and norms, and that thus legal principles such as the equality of the law, non-discrimination, and independence within the criminal justice process are viewed as secondary to political concerns. It concludes to reduce the metaconflict's destructive effects requires all parties to recognise the need for political generosity and compromise and to develop more substantive engagement with the principles of universality and equality underpinning international human rights law. 2

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Victims Who Have Done Nothing or Victims Who Have Done Nothing Wrong: Contesting Blame and ‘Innocent Victim’ Status in Transitioning Societies

Cited by 19 publications

References 56 publications

Bringing narrative victimology to transitional justice: Blame, victimhood and life stories of wrongful conviction

Bringing narrative victimology to transitional justice: Blame, victimhood and life stories of wrongful conviction

Bosnian voices from the bottom of the well: Genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and victims’ right to remedies

Metaconflict and International Human Rights Law in Dealing With Northern Ireland’s Past

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