Heroes Martyrs Victims

"This text examines the psychological effects of martyrdom and martyrs across the world. The authors discuss martyrdom and martyrs through the lens of current events, iconic historical figures, and popular culture"--

Heroes, villains, victims, and minions are more important than ever before in our politics and culture. In the era of television, Twitter, and Facebook, groups and individuals constantly battle over their reputations. One of the best ways to gain power is to persuade others that you are competent, courageous, and benevolent, while your opponents are none of these. Thus, character work consists of more than simple claims of fact; societies build their solidarity and policies out of admiration for heroes but also outrage over villains. Recent political analysis has ignored the great characters of the past in favor of frames, heuristics, codes, and identities. In Public Characters, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern argue that character, reputation, and images matter in politics, and social life more generally, as they help mobilize people and their passions. First, they focus on the political construction of openly constructed and debated public characters to show how we can allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions through them. The authors demonstrate the nuances of characters and their interactions across a range of sources-including Shakespeare, Game of Thrones, Renaissance sculpture, modern comic books, Alexander the Great, and Bernie Madoff-all the while showing how public characters are used in political rhetoric. Finally, they complicate these characters by considering their transformations: when victims manage to become heroes and the way traditional moral characters have evolved over time to correspond with what different cultures admire, detest, or pity. This rich, detailed, and wide-ranging analysis of personal images and reputation marks a timely and crucial contribution for sociologists and political scientists concerned with the cultural dimensions of political life.

During the 24-year Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste, thousands of people died or were killed in circumstances that did not allow the required death rituals to be performed at the time. Since the country attained independence in 1999, families have consequently devoted significant time, effort and resources to fulfilling their obligations to the dead. These obligations are accorded particular significance due to the fact that the dead are ascribed agency and can play a benevolent or malevolent role in the lives of the living. Such grassroots initiatives run in parallel with, and reveal a range of different attitudes towards, official initiatives that seek to transform particular dead bodies into public symbols of heroism, sacrifice and nationhood. This book focuses on the dynamic interplay between the potent presence of the dead in everyday life and their symbolic usefulness in wider processes of state and nation formation.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Reparation for victims of gross and systematic human rights violations is a contemporary issue gaining increased attention in both national and international politics. Post-conflict societies have to face the legacies of the dark past and dealing with a large group of victims is one of them. Transitional justice mechanisms trying to cope with the past should not overlook the issue of reparation. This research demonstrates how reparation for victims of gross and systematic human rights violations differs from reparation for isolated violations. The Rwandan case study unveils the role of victim organisations in and the competition and politicisation of the reparation debate. Although reparation for victims is a crucial element in transitional justice, it becomes clear that the way in which the reparation debate unfolds does not necessarily contribute to the peaceful future of a post-conflict society. This study argues that remedying the process and debate of the search for reparation will lead to an improved and more constructive reparation policy. Heidy Rombouts is a legal and social scientist (1997, Master of Laws; 1999, Master in Social and Political Sciences, Catholic University of Leuven). In 2004 she obtained a PhD degree in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Antwerp for her research on victim organisations and the politics of reparation. For several years she has been conducting research on transitional justice, human rights and post-conflict situations, including extensive field research in South Africa and Rwanda.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds.She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of "Never Again": as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are.The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s.Dean argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis. Dean's latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of "deserving" and "undeserving" victims on those who have suffered.