Victim Professionals and Professionalized Victims

Abstract

Abstract This chapter critically engages with the expectations of professionalization that recurred in bureaucrats’ encounters with people recognized as victims. What kind of subject is the professional(ized) victim, and what work do the narratives and practices of professionalization do during transitions from violence? Speaking of professionalization, rather than only of professionalism, brings a process into focus. The chapter pays attention to the politics of the ‘victim’ subject this process produces and the mechanisms and labour by which this subject comes into being, becomes ideal(ized), or is contested. Focusing on the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms, rather than the legacies of the violence of the armed conflict, this chapter brings to the fore the labour, paperwork, vernaculars, and ways of being these programmes require and inspire. The chapter also takes seriously the care work that people do in the margins and shadows of the bureaucracy of victimhood.