(Research Summary by Katherine Furl)
While what constitutes “victimhood” status has been long-debated, claims to victimhood are leveraged by a wide variety of actors to politically meaningful ends—and the inherent morality we tend to attach to victims we consider legitimate makes this a useful political strategy for many. In “Strategically Hijacking Victimhood: A Political Communication Strategy in the Discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump,” recently published in Perspectives on Politics, Jessie Barton Hronešová and Daniel Kreiss introduce the concept of “hijacked victimhood” to illustrate how politicians and others in elite positions craft narratives strategically portraying dominant groups as victims of oppression at the hands of marginalized or subaltern groups. In doing so, narratives reliant on hijacked victimhood portray marginalized groups as threats to the security of dominant groups and delegitimize victimhood claims among the marginalized.
Hronešová and Kreiss consider hijacked victimhood a specific form of strategic victimhood. While strategic victimhood serves as a useful political communication practice for those seeking equity and justice, when hijacked, it can permit “dominant groups and their representatives [to] strategically invert moral relations and subvert empirical understandings of harm to defend, preserve, or expand their power.” Hijacked victimhood is therefore tied to a specific group of potential victims—those who, in a national or other broad sociopolitical context, are in positions of social dominance or power.
To demonstrate what hijacked victimhood looks like in practice, Hronešová and Kreiss examined speeches from two contemporary political leaders employing populist, nationalist platforms—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Though Orbán and Trump differ in their specific employment of hijacked victimhood, both rely on narratives of hijacked victimhood frequently and in often strikingly similar ways. Orbán and Trump alike portray their white, Christian constituents as put-upon and exploited by a shadowy “elite” and under threat from nonwhite immigrant “Others” who themselves are frequently construed as pawns in the plans of global “elites.” Both leaders also attempt to connect the apparent current victimhood of the dominant groups they claim to represent to supposed legacies of victimization—and both assert the only way to escape these legacies of victimhood is through the protection of Orbán and Trump as saviors, respectively.
Elite narratives reliant on hijacked victimhood do more than secure those crafting the narratives positions in power: they also “weake[n] and delegitimize[e] claims of actual victims, demoraliz[e] communities of out-groups, and desensitiz[e] majority populations to sources of human suffering.” Understanding when strategic victimhood is hijacked, then, helps us to understand the ways in which strategies that may further equity in justice in some contexts can be used to unjust ends in other arenas.
The images cast across screens across the country on January 6, 2021, laid bare the fragility of American democracy as the steps and halls of the US Capitol were inundated by a violent band of insurrectionists. Fed by blatant lies, political anger, and racial animus, they sought to halt a procedure enshrined in the US Constitution and to overturn a freely and fairly run election. Meanwhile, efforts to obstruct, avoid, and misrepresent the subsequent investigation of the January 6th attack have continued apace.
With a relative dearth of work that centers historical and contemporary racial, ethnic, and power dynamics in the context of media, our interdisciplinary field was caught flat-footed, unprepared to respond to those who actively seek to undermine American democracy. This edited volume is a first step toward remedying that situation. Media and January 6th brings together a diverse group of leading scholars to help us more clearly understand the relationship between media and the attempted coup. The volume examines why and how January 6th came to be and the centrality of media to the event. It is organized around three key questions: How should we understand January 6, 2021? What should research look like after January 6, 2021? And how can we prevent another event like this?
(Research Summary by Katherine Furl)
In an environment where previously unforeseeable amounts of confidential data are available to an ever-growing number of businesses, understanding the best approaches to litigating potential breaches of data privacy is of utmost importance. In “Data Controllers as Data Fiduciaries: Theory, Definitions, and Burdens of Proof,” Noelle Wilson and Amanda Reid examine two common regulatory models discussed in the context of U.S. consumer privacy law—the Rights/Obligations Model mirroring language from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the Fiduciary Model, based on preexisting obligations of confidentiality seen in doctor-patient and attorney-client relationships. Wilson and Reid argue for a hybridized version of these two models, allowing for adaptable and consistent legislation capable of protecting as many Americans as possible from violations of their data privacy.
Several states have adopted privacy laws following the Rights/Obligations Model, granting consumers certain rights and imposing related obligations on businesses. Many of these laws borrow a pair of terms from the EU GDRP—“data controllers,” who have some role in how data are ultimately used, and “data processors,” who merely process data at the behest of data controllers. Though these privacy laws are better than nothing, notable protection gaps remain. As one example, most privacy laws under the Rights/Obligation Model in the U.S. can only be enforced by state attorneys general, and all of these laws leave protections afforded to U.S. citizens up to their geographic location within specific states.
To circumvent these limitations, Wilson and Reid propose considering data controllers as data fiduciaries and adapting U.S. consumer privacy laws in line with a Fiduciary Model. In such a model, the focus shifts to the relationships between businesses as trusted entities tasked with ensuring the privacy of users and users as parties guaranteed protection within these relationships. These relationships can be understood as predicated on information asymmetry—businesses have far more access to users’ personal information than users have access to sensitive information related to businesses. Nevertheless, the Fiduciary Model presents its own limitations, including that it is quite vague.
Wilson and Reid thus propose adopting a Hybrid Model, using the data controller/data processor terminology in the Rights/Obligation Model alongside the focus on relationality and information asymmetry emphasized in the Fiduciary Model. They argue for consumer privacy laws in the U.S. to impose fiduciary duties upon data controllers and for businesses to be considered data controllers by default unless they are able to prove they should instead be considered data processors (who would not be held to the same standards of fiduciary duties toward users).
By adopting a Hybrid Model in consumer privacy law, Wilson and Reid hope U.S. lawmakers will be able to adopt flexible, time-tested policies able to protect even the most vulnerable populations from data privacy breaches.