Victims’ Stories Matter: The Expressivist Foundation of International Criminal Justice and the Narrative Victimology Perspective

This project aims to study the role of victims as active participants in the establishment of historical records, using for the first time in the field of international criminal justice the approach of narrative victimology, which has been developed in domestic criminal justice. This research seeks to demonstrate that the narrative victimology emphasis on victims’ ownership of their narrative offers a novel and important framework to study the constitutive role of narratives, particularly in the construction of victimization as a historical event. The extensive analysis of the case law of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will explore to what extent victims’ narratives are read as constitutive parts of the defence and prosecution’s discursive battles about how mass violence is best understood, explained and responded to.