Global hierarchies of victimhood

In this chapter we present the central theoretical insight of the book—that, globally, lives of some victims are deemed more valuable than the lives of others, which in turn determines the nature of their legal and symbolic recognition and the extent of commercial exploitability of their suffering. This chapter examines Colombia’s Victims’ Law (2011), which does not recognize victims of drug violence, excluding them from the processes of transitional justice in the country. Despite the fact that not only in Colombia, but also in several Latin American countries, deaths caused by cartel violence easily meet criteria of civil war, this is generally not acknowledged in scholarly literature on transitional justice. The chapter argues that the binary distinction between war and crime fails to address the needs of victims of mass drug violence and creates a hierarchy among victims. This has important symbolic, legal, and material implications for those who find themselves in the less favoured category. Victims of drug related violence struggle to access justice and to make their voices heard in public discourses about violence. We argue that the current understanding of mass drug violence as a ‘conventional crime’ represents a Northern perspective on violence, which can be counterproductive when used uncritically in Southern contexts.