Good Victims

Abstract As of 2023, over nine million Colombians have secured official recognition as victims of an armed conflict that has lasted decades. The category of ‘victim’ is not a mere description of having suffered harm, but a political status and a potential site of power. This book investigates the political as a feminist question. What kind of politics is the politics of victimhood? What does it mean to understand the victim subject as a political subject, and the political subject as shaped through victimhood? Based on in-depth engagement in Colombia, the analysis demonstrates the possibilities of politics through, rather than in opposition to, the status of ‘victim.’ Encompassing acts of care, agency, and haunting, the politics of victimhood entangle people who identify as victims, researchers, and transitional justice professionals. Victims do not merely exist; they are also made, not only through acts of violence during war, but also through acts of bureaucratic affirmation in its tenuous aftermath. This book shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state, and of bringing a vision of it into being through bureaucratic encounters in the wake of war. Directing feminist curiosity towards how different actors experience, produce, and contest victimhood, Good Victims also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when seeking to understand the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms.