The right to commemoration and “ideal victims”: the puzzle of victim dissatisfaction with State-led commemoration after 9/11 and 3/11

ABSTRACT

This article explores the puzzle of victim dissatisfaction with State-led commemoration following 9/11 and 3/11 by offering a cross-national case study through which to view key areas of theoretical debate in the sociology of human rights, cultural trauma and collective memory, and the politics of victimhood. Although State-led commemorative processes are often highly contested, we would expect them to be less so in the cases of 9/11 and 3/11, given broad social consensus about the victims’ right to commemoration and the traumatic nature of the events, and especially the “ideal nature” of the victims who as symbolic representatives of the State are conferred with great moral authority. Drawing on primary and secondary data on the commemoration of the attacks of 11th September 2001 and 11th March 2004 we find that despite sharp differences between commemorative processes, three common key areas of contestation and dissatisfaction for victims emerge: political instrumentalisation, hierarchies of worth and exclusion. We show how the status of ideal victimhood for victims of transnational terrorism carries within it an inherent paradox which provides the key to their dissatisfaction, namely the moral authority conferred on them as representatives of the State simultaneously depersonalises them, excluding them as individuals with rights and needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational terrorism
• victims
• commemoration
• human rights
• taxonomies of worth

Acknowledgments

The support for this project was provided by British Academy Grant SG100556 and by PSC-CUNY Award PSCREG-40-718 funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. We would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Antonio Montañés Jiménez and to thank Remo Fernández-Carro.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/RemedyAndReparation.aspx.

2. We define victims here in accordance with V.8 of the Basic Principles, as persons who individually or collectively suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that constitute gross violations of international human rights law … and immediate family or dependants… (United Nations 2005)

3. For Spain, we searched in El País (EP), Spain´s centre-left national newspaper, and in ABC, the centre-right national newspaper, using the terms “11-M” and at least one of “homenaj*”, “Atocha”, “conmemora*”, “aniversario”,, “monumento”. For the United States, we searched within news publications of the New York City area, including The Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Sun, The New York Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and also the Star-Ledger, using the terms “9/11” and at least one of “*memor*”, “anniversary” “monu*” along with either Ground Zero, twin towers, 911 or WTC . Because of the greater number of publications searched for the New York dataset, we limited the search to those articles where the keywords appeared in the headline or lead paragraph.

4. For a detailed review of the centrality of use of newspaper data in event analysis, and how to overcome attendant bias problems, see Earl et al. (2004).

5. The victims associations devote significant time and resources to these ongoing problems as documented on their web pages, in interviews and in the press.

6. After criticising President Aznar’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq, A11MAT President Manjón was sent emails of the corpse of her son; she reported that she and other members of her association also received death threats and were told to “shove their dead up their ass”. She had a police escort in 2005 due to death threats (ABC 2005; El País 2011; Cadena SER 2004).

Additional information

Funding

The support for this project was provided by British Academy Grant SG100556 and by PSC-CUNY Award PSCREG-40-718 funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

Notes on contributors

Cristina Flesher Fominaya

Cristina Flesher Fominaya is an Editor of Social Movement Studies, a Founding Editor of Interface Journal, and author of Social Movements and Globalization (Palgrave). As of April 2018, she is a Reader in Social Politics and Media at Loughborough University, UK. She publishes widely on European and global social movements, hybrid parties, digital politics and media, collective identity, democracy, autonomy, and participation.

Rosemary Barberet

Rosemary Barberet is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, New York USA.  She is the author of Women, Crime and Criminal Justice: A Global Enquiry (Routledge) and the Editor of Feminist Criminology (Sage).  She publishes in areas related to international criminology and criminal justice.