Speaker: Professor Cheryl Lawther (QUB)

Chair: Professor Louise Mallinder (QUB)

In this Seminar, Mitchell Institute Fellow Professor Cheryl Lawther will discuss the themes explored in her latest book Constructing Victimhood: Beyond Innocence and Guilt in Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Constructing Victimhood goes ‘beyond innocence and guilt’ to make a step change in our understanding of the constructing, politicisation, and reproduction of victimhood during periods of conflict and transition.  The book argues that restricting our understanding of victimhood to tried and tested debates on ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’ victims and the existence of complex political victims results in a limited andpartial understanding of victimhood.  Rather, the book argues that victimhood is constructed by larger questions concerning the existence of hierarchies of victimhood, the exercise of voice and agency, the role of silence and the silencing of certain variants of victimhood, the presence of victimhood in the physical landscape and the haunting impact of unresolved legacies of violent conflict.  Such a perspective demands that we engage with critical questions concerning, for example, why certain victims’ voices are heard and not others, how victims’ voices may become ‘frozen’ in politically convenient scripts, the ability of victims and survivors to ‘do victimhood work’ versus the ways in which those voices may be shaped, amplified or usurped by those speaking ‘on behalf of’ victims and  how the choice to remain silent on certain experiences of victimhood and the choiceless silencing of others straddles the personal and the political   While the book is based in highly sensitive in-depth interviews with victims and survivors of the Northern Ireland conflict, its conclusion speak to both the local and the global. 

Read more about the book here.

Professor Cheryl Lawther

Cheryl Lawther is a Fellow of the Mitchell Institute and Professor of Transitional Justice in the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast.  Her research interests concern truth recovery and dealing with the past, victims, ex-combatants, reparations, atrocity sites and the politics of dead bodies.  Cheryl’s most recent book, ‘Constructing Victimhood: Beyond Innocence and Guilt in Transitional Justice’ was published by Oxford University Press in January 2025.  She is the previous recipient of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Fulbright Ireland Scholarship and AHRC Early Career Grant amongst other awards.  Beyond academia, Cheryl is a member of the Victims’ Payments Board and the Victims' Commissioners Advisory Panel.

 Professor Louise Mallinder

Louise Mallinder is Deputy Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice and a Professor of Law and at Queen’s University Belfast.  At the University of Chicago she is a Faculty Affiliate of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and was the 2024 Pozen Professor of Human Rights.  She holds a PhD in law, an LLM in human rights law, and BA in economic and social history and politics, all from Queen’s University Belfast.  Her book Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize and the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association Early Career Prize.  She is co-editing The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace, and co-authored Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (2022).

She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy.  She is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group, and of the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges.  She was Chair of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights non-governmental organization based in Belfast, during 2015-2020, and was Vice-Chair during 2013-2015 and 2020-2024.