Victimology Between the Local and the Global

Abstract

This special issue is about victimization as a very personal experience that is profoundly susceptible to communal forgetting. It includes an important quantitative contribution in the conventional routine activities theory tradition. At the same time, it challenges conventional victimological examinations, while raising critical race, class and gendered issues. The essays herein help us to see more abstract architectures of routine activity that channel whole societies and the entire global community to see victimization or to be wilfully blind to it; to classify victimization into legal categories that neuter it or that acknowledge it; that silence victims or listen to them; that promote collective amnesia or collective memory and to propose new critical lenses to the study of victimology. To connect local experience of victimization to global transformation at least several loops of learning are needed. Perhaps the art of liberating victims is figuring out how to link local loops of learning from personal stories to more encompassing loops through events like national enquiries, up to institutions like the International Criminal Court. When national loops of learning wilfully obstruct international learning from the experience of victims, victim advocates must figure out how to by-pass obstructive intermediate communication loops. They must use modalities like the internet and NGO networks to connect to different loops of communication that will take their experience more seriously. Victimology between the local and the global aims at challenging globalized and localized workings of power, by offering localized voices of victims that allow theorizing bottom up. Yet, and at the same time, it hopes to challenge localized architectures and geographies of power that construct and re-produce victimization, while offering larger theoretical critical directions.