We are delighted to host the excellent Jessie Barton Hronešová at Royal Holloway on Wednesday 3 December, 1pm-2pm, in McCrae 2-02. You might have seen victimhood being used by politicians in lots of countries, not just in Eastern Europe, so we can learn a lot here.
The New Politics of Victimhood in Eastern Europe
Abstract: This talk offers key insights from an upcoming book on the politics of victimhood as a central yet contested feature of contemporary public life in eastern Europe. While the region is often described through its long history of violence, foreign domination, and geopolitical marginalization, I argue that it is not past victimizations per se but their selective reinterpretation that animates political discourse today. Victimhood functions as symbolic and moral capital: it can legitimize demands for redress, defend national identity and democracy, or be hijacked to invert moral orders and absolve responsibility. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, political speech analysis, elite interviews, and focus groups with students in Czechia, Hungary and Serbia—I analyse how actors strategically deploy narratives of victimhood through frames of suffering, injustice, security, and lessons from history. I treat victimhood not as an objective status but as a narrative and interpretive framework. This allows me to capture its relational and situational nature: who is cast as a victim, who as a perpetrator, and what moral obligations follow. My analysis highlights how dominant political actors in Hungary, Serbia, and the Czech Republic mobilize defensive and hijacked victimhood to resist external criticism, consolidate power, and reframe national belonging vis-à-vis the European Union, Russia, and global liberal norms. At the same time, counter-narratives—especially among younger generations—demonstrate scepticism and disillusionment, pointing to the limits of hegemonic victimhood discourses. By tracing these dynamics, the book contributes to a broader understanding of how victimhood politics shape democratic trajectories, memory practices, and Europe’s fractured moral and political landscape.
Biography: Dr Jessie Barton Hronešová is a lecturer in political sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and Co-Director of the Centre for Study of Places, Identities and Memories. In her work, she focuses on victimhood narratives, the politics of memory, transitional justice and dealing with the past in Central and Southeast Europe. She is the author of The Struggle of Redress: Victim Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and Post-War Ethno-National Identities of Young People in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Frank Lang 2012). She currently works on a new book on victimhood politics and co-edits a handbook on memory politics in Southeast Europe (Brill). She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2018).