https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420985846 European Journal of Cultural Studies 2021, Vol. 24(1) 3–9 © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1367549420985846 journals.sagepub.com/home/ecs EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF Introduction to special issue: The logic of victimhood Lilie Chouliaraki and Sarah Banet-Weiser London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Abstract This special issue aims to identify the social and affective dynamics that circulate and attach to the ‘master’ signifier of victimhood in liberal public spheres. Drawing on cutting-edge work by leading scholars across theoretical traditions, the issue illuminates the ways in which victimhood emerges as a dominant communicative logic in three distinct but interrelated domains of liberal publicity: its histories, politics and aesthetics. Keywords Aesthetics, histories, misogyny, politics, populism, victimhood When #BlackLivesMatter became a major twitter trend in protest to the racialized vio- lence and disproportionate loss of Black American lives by US police in 2014, #AllLivesMatter swiftly emerged as a counter-claim to a different victimhood: Why are white lives excluded from the movement? And, in the spring of 2020, when civil upris- ings resisting police brutality against Black people were met with tear gas and rubber bullets, it was the police, not the people they targeted, who were often seen as the victims of these protests. Similarly, as thousands of migrants and refugees flee war and poverty risking their lives to reach safety, Europeans and Americans imagine themselves as vic- tims in need of protection – a ‘Fortress Europe’ in the European Union or Trump’s wall separating the United States from the Mexican border. Finally, when Brett Kavanaugh came face-to-face with Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of rape in the public hearing of his US Supreme Judge appointment in 2018, President Trump echoed a wider Corresponding author: Lilie Chouliaraki, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Str., London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: l.chouliaraki@lse.ac.uk 985846ECS 0 0 10.1177/1367549420985846European Journal of Cultural StudiesChouliaraki and Banet-Weiser research-article 2020 Special Issue Article