Constructing Victimhood

Cheryl Lawther is a Reader at the School of Law and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. Her research interests are in the fields of transitional justice, truth recovery, victims and the use of atrocity sites. She is the author of 'Truth, Denial and Transition: Northern Ireland and the Contested Past' (Routledge 2014) and lead editor of the 'Research Handbook on Transitional Justice' (Edward Elgar 2017, 2023). Cheryl is the previous recipient of the Brian Williams Article Prize by the British Society of Criminology, a Fulbright Ireland Scholarship and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

• 1: Introduction: Victimhood in Transition2: Constructing Victimhood: Innocence, Guilt, and Definitional Dilemmas3: Victimhood and Heroes and Hierarchies4: Victimhood and Voice5: Doing Victimhood: Agency, Activism, and the Mobilisation of Empathy6: Victimhood, Silence, and Denial7: Victimhood and the Haunting of Lives, Landscapes, and Unresolved Pasts8: Conclusion

The title and subtitle of this superb book accurately describe its contents. It will prove an admirable addition to the literature on transitional justice, focusing on Northern Ireland. It also provides a superb overview of victimology and serves as an essential contribution to this field. Lawther (Queen's Univ. Belfast, UK) makes excellent use of slightly differing but complementary versions of critical criminology, including such icons as Nils Christie and Stan Cohen.