In Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, Lilie Chouliaraki asks a set of timely questions: “What kind of world is a world of proliferating victims where each of the two sides competes to establish its suffering as more legitimate than that of the other? How did this world come to be as it is today? What are the benefits of living in it? And, more importantly, what are the costs?” (p. 4). Chouliaraki is a professor of media and communications, and she explores these questions by drawing on examples ranging from populist narratives about the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to the #MeToo movement, from struggles around Roe v. Wade in the United States to soldiers’ construction of their own masculinity in recent wars worldwide.

One of Chouliaraki’s most significant contributions is the distinction she makes between pain and suffering as conditions versus as bases for claim-making. It is the latter that she is most interested in, turning her attention to how victimhood becomes a linguistic claim and “a whole politics of communication, where competing claims to pain and their communities of recognition struggle for domination” (p. 7). The argument nudges readers away from the question of who a “true” or “real” victim is, recognizing that it is neither practically possible nor ethically desirable to pin down the victim (at least not in the singular form, preceded by the definite article). Instead, the book invites us to be curious about the entanglement of victimhood, politics, and power. “Under which conditions do certain claims to pain constitute certain selves as victims? Which positions of power do these selves speak from?” she asks (p. 36).

If “claims to victimhood are claims to power” (p. 4), we must interrogate how victimhood becomes vulnerable to manipulation by those seeking to consolidate their power or to deny others’ claims to power. By closely analyzing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s rhetorical moves during the COVID-19 pandemic, Wronged sheds light on how populists have relied on a communication of pain that weaves together denial, deception, and selective elevation of some stories to the exclusion of others. The book closely tracks mechanisms of “normalisation (the virus is just the flu), militarisation (the pandemic is a war), and obfuscation (hydroxychloroquine cures the virus),” ultimately demonstrating how populist leaders marshalled narratives that sought to “ignore the suffering of the people and to attach victimhood to a privileged few” (p. 81).

A further strength of this book is evident in the deft negotiation of the relationship between victimhood and time. Even though it feels like the currency of victimhood is especially salient in the times in which we live, we must turn to the past to understand victimhood. The term has long and contested histories in religious texts and beyond, and it has undergone significant transformations through public struggles over time, especially during periods of violence. Alongside the recognition that the weighted histories of mobilization based on victimhood can bring wisdom to bear on the present uses of the term, Chouliaraki acknowledges that the internet and social media have shaped modern relationships to victimhood. What she calls “the platformization of pain,” which refers to “the performance of vulnerability on and through the commercial logic of social media platforms” (p. 30), has “enabled everyone with a mobile phone and a social media account to broadcast their pain to the 4.48 billion users across social media platforms” (p. 31).

Chouliaraki is a wonderfully incisive companion when it comes to thinking about what victimhood communicates. Communication is more than broadcast. It implies a relationship with audiences and listeners, who have responses and thoughts of their own. What does the broadcast of pain do not only to how we understand ourselves and our own suffering, but also to how we receive, witness, and respond to the pain and suffering of others? I was reminded, here, of Jill Stauffer’s writing about ethical loneliness in her 2015 book by the same name, which results not from oppressed or persecuted people not speaking out, but from “the failure of just-minded people to hear well” (p. 2). Critically engaging with a politics of communication invites us to ask ourselves how we can become better recipients, listeners, and witnesses to others’ pain and suffering. If more of us took that question seriously, might pain and suffering need to shout less loudly today in the attempt to be heard?

Wronged offers the reader a set of questions that critically examine the politics of victimhood. These include: “Who speaks and in which capacity, and who remains silenced? What truth claims to pain do the actors involved make, and how can these claims be scrutinised? What kinds of emotions do claims to pain attach do these actors?” (p. 126). These questions are both theoretically informed and deeply practical, potentially guiding how we read the newspaper, browse social media, or speak to our loved ones around the table. They can also inform how we make sense of ourselves and the stories we tell about what hurts in us.

I want to dwell for a moment on the self. Wronged is a model for books that spring from personal, intimate places and look outward. The grace and power of this book lies in the “and,” in the simultaneity of intimate origin stories and outward orientations. By the end of the first paragraph of the preface, Chouliaraki reveals some of the physical and emotional struggles with which she lives because of long-term serious illness. I will not paraphrase that story here because it is worth reading in its entirety and on the author’s own terms. It matters where books begin, and Chouliaraki chose to start here, in the (vulnerable) body. Some of what makes Chouliaraki such a wise companion is her acknowledgment that a body is never just a body in a vacuum. Its pain and suffering are relational; its vulnerability is negotiated in a chorus of other pains. “That millions may suffer does not of course mean that one person’s pain should be diminished,” Chouliaraki writes. “It means, however, that a single person’s pain is always part of and relative to a sea of suffering that occurs among us on a daily basis and should be viewed in this context” (p. vii).

Chouliaraki and I appear to have a lot in common beyond our mutual preoccupation with victimhood in the realm of research. I, too, live with a life-altering illness that has shaped what and how I think about my research on vulnerability, even if that is a story that, for now, I narrate elliptically and with hesitation in my academic work. I was very moved to see Chouliaraki claim her body—and, more than that, her body-in-the-world—as a starting point for theory. This, too, is one of the book’s remarkable strengths: That the body and Chouliaraki’s points are starting points for theory, not the endpoints of the story. “Even if my own experience of pain informs every twist and turn of my theoretical argument,” Chouliaraki notes, “at no point does it enter the narrative of this book—in part because it is difficult to write analytically about my own circumstances and in part because of my belief that embodied suffering is always traversed by societal forces and needs to link up to structural explanation in order to turn to critical argument” (p. xii). Chouliaraki’s gift to the reader is her delicate and powerful acknowledgment that we live in bodies, and that our own experience of pain can be fodder for theory, while also reminding us that theory that starts with or from the self can (and perhaps must) still be outward-looking, especially if it endeavors to engage critically with questions of power.

In the spirit of paying attention to where books begin, it is also worth noting where they end. The final word in the conclusion is “suffering.” I found myself wondering as I read: Must pain, suffering, and victimhood go together? And what might we learn from the moments in which their paths diverge, from the subjects who may live in pain but do not consider themselves to be suffering, or from the subjects who live in pain and who are suffering but who choose not to make claims of victimhood? Given the sophisticated analysis Chouliaraki has offered throughout the book, I imagine she has fascinating answers to these questions. I look forward to learning from our continued conversation.