Good victims: the political as a feminist question

A seemingly simple, yet vastly multilayered question animates Roxani Krystalli's book: what does it mean to be a good victim (p. 1)? In Good victims, Krystalli explores how questions of the political infuse ‘performances of victimhood and the hierarchies that emerge’ through transitional justice (p. 10). Focusing on the bureaucratic construction of the victim as a subject in the Colombian transitional justice context, Krystalli's account of victimhood centres stories of hope, disappointment, anger, joy, violence and care.

The book is an exercise in ethnography and storytelling. Drawing on interviews with 157 Colombian state officials, NGO representatives and other people who identify as victims, the author does not seek to smooth over the contestations between their stories, but rather to shed light on their messiness. In a poignant vignette, Krystalli shares the advice of Carlos, an NGO professional in Bogotá. His advice was imparted over a cup of coffee and became pivotal to her research focus. As Carlos put it, ‘I understand why you don't want to go asking victims to narrate and narrate. You wouldn't be the first, nor would you be the last … If you really want to understand the category of “victim”, all you have to do is pull up a chair and sit here and watch me all day … If you're asking for my advice, I say: don't study the victims. Study the people producing them’ (p. 78). Krystalli eschews a project that, in asking vulnerable and over-researched populations to retell their stories, could re-victimize them. Instead, the book investigates the role of victim bureaucracies and state transitional justice endeavours. The author is a caring and graceful storyteller, and she narrates a multidimensional story of victimhood that includes other stories, told and untold, whispered and haunted in the lives of those who seek ‘to remake a universe of justice’ in the wake of violence (p. 190).

One of the book's most compelling findings is that transitional justice processes make victimhood legible in ways that delimit the justice opportunities for people victimized during conflict. In chapter five, Krystalli focuses on how those who identify as victims are seen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This depends on how well they follow a professionalized script of victimhood that entails being punctual and compliant at meetings; praising state officials for their ‘generosity’ in providing assistance; and not speaking out or being ‘ungrateful’ for the assistance provided (see chapter five). Here, Krystalli pays attention to the labour of victimhood that the bureaucracies and the institucionalidad [institutionality] of Colombia's transitional justice system demands from the victims in question. Krystalli is attentive to the risks of bureaucratization and she shows how paperwork, powerpoints and other indicators of transitional justice cannot account for the community and solidarity work that victims undertake. In chapter six, she traces the dangers of categorizing victimhood into discrete identities, which fracture people into woman or Indigenous or LGBTIQ+ or disabled so that they may be legible within a bureaucracy that cannot deal with complexity (pp. 186–8). In chapter seven, Krystalli questions the temporal politics of victimhood, problematizing state narratives of victimhood as a transitional condition to be ‘overcome’ through neo-liberal employment opportunities. These include selling artisanal bags and marmalades in hotels and marketing sites of atrocity as ‘destination[s] of communitarian tourism’ (p. 206). Krystalli emphasizes the political nature of these processes when she asks what is at stake when victimhood is rendered as a burden to be overcome, rather than being considered an ongoing and embodied experience across time.

The book also makes an important contribution to feminist studies. For Krystalli, the political is a feminist question, ‘an unfinished, ongoing project of insistence on investigating the political’ (p. 26). In the book, feminism is not concerned with gender or women as its central focus: it comes across in the treatment of her interlocutors' stories. Additionally, she travels with feminist companions, including Cynthia Enloe, Sara Ahmed and Lola Olufemi, who inform Krystalli's contribution on different levels.

This book is a joy to read. It is honest and evocative of the (un)seen and (un)heard (in)justice universes that constitute bureaucracies of victimhood. In the spirit of thinking with and alongside this important book, I do not offer an incisive critique, but rather a generative one that Krystalli herself reflects on. In a footnote, she laments not asking more about love, care and joy during her time in Colombia (p. 124). This is an important point, as the author acknowledges that the ‘search for justice is fuelled not only by the wounds of violence, but by the persistence of love’ (p. 104). These reflections intimate not a flaw in the book, but a beginning and a deepening of the feminist questions that Krystalli continues to ask about the politics of victimhood in the wake of violence.