Creating or Mitigating Victim Hierarchies in History Education?

• In Event: 40862 - Section on Human Rights Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Human Rights Roundtable 1

Abstract

Increasingly, scholars have pointed to the problem of victim hierarchies following mass atrocity. Some have pointed to the unequal allocation of resources, including health care and economic compensation as a primary cause of victim hierarchies (Berry 2018, Krystalli 2024). Others have linked victim hierarchies to stratified structures of collective memory resulting from a new moral remembrance phenomenon (David 2020). Yet scholars seem to agree that contestations over victim identity are often shaped by local socio-political factors and legal definitions (Jankowitz 2018). Despite these emerging theories, we still know remarkedly little regarding why victim hierarchies may emerge in one post-conflict context and not in another. This paper comparatively and qualitatively compares the cases of post-conflict Rwanda and Sierra Leone. It asks why victim hierarchies became rigidified and institutionalized in educational materials in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan civil war and genocide and why such hierarchies did not come to bear in the aftermath of an 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone.

I build upon David’s theory of moral remembrance, which argues memorialization processes, rooted in an ideology of human rights, adopt a victim-perpetrator-bystander lens. As a result, individuals with experiences that do not align with such logic are often forgotten. While the case of Rwanda supports David’s theory, I argue this theory does not adequately account for other episodes of mass violence where victim and perpetrator categories are far more ambiguous, such as in Sierra Leone. I draw upon 15 months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Sierra Leone; nearly 200 interviews with parents, teachers, and educational experts; participant observation of social studies and history classrooms; and content analysis of educational materials.

Author

• Jillian LaBranche, Princeton University