Creating the Victim: From Innocent Victims to Indebted Subjects

Abstract

Abstract This chapter asks why people in Kenya and Uganda engage in the Court’s processes, and what that engagement does to them. The question of how the Court relates to affected communities and victims has been mainly studied through the concept of legitimacy. Challenging this approach, I instead propose to read the Court’s victim engagement through critical ideology theory. On that basis, I argue that the Court’s victim engagement works by creating its own victim subjects. I first illustrate how victims are ‘spotlighted’, ‘lured’, ‘schooled’, and ‘blamed’ in their encounter with the Court, and then focus on what subject is produced in the process. Rather than passive victims, the Court creates active victim subjects (‘champions’) and, rather than ‘innocent victims’, the Court creates blameworthy victims. I will illuminate this process of ideological subject formation through the notion of the blame cascade. What makes blame stick to victims is the fusion of moral and material processes: through assistance and reparation programmes, victims are incorporated into labour and debt relationships, which reconstruct them as ‘lazy’, ‘unproductive’, and ‘unreliable’.