Roxani Krystalli’s compelling new book, Good Victims: The Political as Feminist Question, tells a rare and necessary story. It is a story of people and practices that typically remain unseen: the waiting rooms of bureaucracy, the paperwork of recognition, the rehearsed narratives, the public testimonies and private griefs, and the emotional labor and formal encounters required to be acknowledged as a “good victim” and deemed eligible for state compensation. Written in deeply moving prose, Krystalli’s narrative relies on her ethnography of Colombia’s transitional justice process and the actors involved in it, foregrounding the personal voices of those actors while never losing sight of the asymmetries of power that shape and constrain them. What emerges through her textured account is the profound insight that the figure of the victim, far from being an essential identity conferred by violence, is a contingent and performative political category. Victimhood, Krystalli brilliantly demonstrates, is forged through the rituals of bureaucracy and their ambivalent interplay of coercion and care.

As I read Good Victims at the same time as I received the first copy of my own recent book (reviewed by Krystalli in this Critical Dialogue), I could not help but place our authorial voices in an imagined conversation with each other. Both Krystalli and I approach victimhood as a claim to visibility and recognition, but Krystalli goes further—first, in linking recognition to institutional norms and scripts; second, in locating victimhood within a precarious space of complicity between state benevolence and state violence; and finally, in highlighting the political agency already inherent in people’s performances of victimhood and in linking these to a feminist politics of hope. Let me reflect on each of those contributions in turn.

Good Victims is exceptional in detailing the role that state recognition plays within Colombia’s effort to heal from the violence of its long-term civil war and to do justice to those who, as a result of the conflict, suffered loss, displacement, deprivation, oppression, and trauma.

However, state-granted victimhood, Krystalli shows across three fascinating chapters, is not automatically conferred upon those who have suffered; it must first be recognized as legitimate by those actors and rituals that possess the authority to name it as such. As she puts it, “the paperwork, shorthand of regulations, manners of speech that mark a shared terrain and vocabulary for discussion” (p. 156), what Krystalli calls the disciplinary logics of “professionalization,” selectively offer inclusion to those who can read the grammar of institutions and, at the same time, police the boundaries of what “good” victimhood looks like.

Recognition emerges, in this context, as a critical communicative mechanism through which institutional compliance, narrative coherence, and emotional performance are assessed and judged as personal competences of each individual claimant, conferring the status of “victim” to some and not to others. This process is political precisely because it is uneven. Caught within the intricacies of state bureaucracy, not all citizens possess the status credentials, cultural capital, or communicative fluency required to render their pain recognizable: “Since 2021,” as Krystalli says, “only 12% of those eligible for compensation had actually received any in the ten years the reparation programme had been active” (p. 22). The ability to get recognized as a “good” victim ultimately reveals itself as a form of moral capital: unevenly distributed and deeply entangled in broader social hierarchies of gender and class.

Krystalli’s reconceptualization of recognition as the performance of victimhood according to normative scripts of civility and deservingness offers a powerful expansion of what I refer to as the politics of pain: the idea that claiming victimhood is not an innocent cry for compassion but a calculated use of the languages of trauma and rights, both of which participate in social struggles over whose suffering becomes acceptable and actionable. While, however, I speak about powerful groups that weaponize their pain to their own advantage, Good Victims highlights the state as the main scene wherein victimhood is performed and evaluated.

It is specifically the state’s imaginaries of responsibility, care, and progress underpinning Colombia’s transitional justice frameworks that become the object of Krystalli’s elegant critique. I was particularly struck by her analysis of these imaginaries’ “temporality of victimhood,” where the legitimacy of a victim’s claim hinges not just on their past suffering but crucially on their willingness to “move on” into an entrepreneurial future aligned with neoliberal ideals of self-responsibility and productivity. This is another key point where Krystalli’s work and mine meet: in our shared assessment of the profound harms of neoliberal entrepreneurialism as an aspirational discourse that promises people a successful future in the market, yet, at the same time, puts the blame for their failure on vulnerable individuals themselves rather than on the structural impediments of the system. Here, transitional justice reveals itself as aspiration and deferral, where the labor of being recognized as a victim becomes, once more, a burden carried disproportionately by the already marginalized.

Indeed, Krystalli’s critique of the state is perhaps most incisive in her engagement with “assistencialismo,” a familiar discourse of welfarism that frames recognized victims as overly dependent on state support and stuck in a past underwritten by subsidies rather than embracing the agency of the market citizen. By refusing to naturalize this binary between passivity and progress, her analysis draws attention to how “assistencialismo” ultimately works to shield the state from scrutiny through the ways it delegitimizes people’s protests over unmet promises by reframing them as the obstacle to national progress. The state’s ideal of “social hope” is thus exposed not as emancipatory, but as exclusionary, offering a future that can only be accessed by those who no longer look back at the past.

In light of this insidious ambivalence, the greatest merit of Good Victims lies in its firm commitment to a feminist ethics of compassionate listening to the lived, affective labors that constitute people-as-victims under state authority. Drawing on feminist literature on care and affect, Krystalli frames victimhood as a site of agency, where people routinely struggle to make sense of the violence inflicted upon them so as to navigate the moral and administrative expectations of their institutions. Her victims are, in this sense, already political subjects within a state system that appears as, at once, benefactor and absentee.

At the same time, in her insistence on a view of politics not as separate from but as “in and through victimhood” (sic, p. 199), Krystalli, once again, enters into dialogue with my work. We both grasp victimhood as a form of action that shapes private selves as much as the sphere of the political, yet, while I treat victimhood as an act of speech that constitute the subjects that speak it, Krystalli endows those subjects with a deep sense of humanity as real, flesh-and-blood individuals marked by their history of violence and injustice yet seeking to make a good life for themselves and their communities.

Here, Krystalli’s feminist praxis gestures toward alternative futures for those people. Without denying that violence remains an ongoing reality of their everyday life, she resists collapsing their identity into suffering. Her vision of political agency allows for movement and reinvention, for victims to step outside (and against) state-authored scripts and choose other roles and other ways of being. To be recognized as a victim, in her account, should never foreclose the possibility of also being a student, a traveler, a worker, and a neighbor. This reimagining of recognition is what makes Krystalli’s voice a vital feminist intervention: it insists that justice must accommodate complexity, ambiguity, and the freedom to reframe one’s own narrative.

Good Victims is an incisive and timely book, clear in its argument and bold in what it asks of us: to scrutinize one of the most “sacred” words of our global moral imaginary, that of the victim. And like all important work, it holds the conversation open. The questions that it compels us to confront—some of which I formulate here by way of conclusion—feel increasingly urgent in the face of the rise of illiberalism, the collapse of global structures for the protection of victims, and the unspeakable cruelty we are witnessing on our screens on a daily basis. How does the selective recognition of some victims over others in our public institutions and discourse open the door for powerful actors (particularly on the far right) to turn victimhood into a political weapon so as to claim power? In an era where pain is thoroughly platformized and weaponized, what kinds of political response can support the recognition not only of voices that are heard, but also of those that remain silent, those that resist, and those that claim the right not to perform? And finally, how can we, as scholars and practitioners, remain alert to the ways in which dominant scripts of victimhood reproduce exclusions, and instead imagine and cultivate a more ethically generous account of what it means to live through violence and speak out on harm? I am curious as to what Krystalli might say about these provocations.