Analyzing Competitive Victimhood: Narratives of recognition and nonrecognition in the pursuit of reconciliation

Abstract

The dissertation examines competitive victimhood, the situation in which opposing groups assert themselves to be the sole or primary victims of a conflict or use their historical suffering to rationalise their own transgressions, and asks how it shapes ethnonational reconciliation. It studies four relationships: Turkish–Armenian relations, Catholic Republican and Protestant Unionist relations in Northern Ireland, and Bosniak–Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat–Bosniak relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The analysis rests on sixty interviews together with public opinion polls, party manifestos, political statements, NGO reports, documents and memory sites.

Instead of a binary between competitive and inclusive victimhood, the dissertation proposes five levels of competitiveness: revengeful victimhood, strong, mid and weak competitive victimhood, and inclusive victimhood. The weak and inclusive categories are read as signs of potential memory-sharing between groups. The dissertation was defended at Södertörn University on 20 October 2023, with Professor Camilla Orjuela (University of Gothenburg) as external reviewer.