Not in our Names!

Survivors of Terrorism as Public Stakeholders in Germany and the United States since the 1980s

Ezra Rudolph

The project explores the very different yet often intertwined (his)stories of German and U.S. interest groups founded by survivors of terrorism. Looking at different cases of terrorism in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1980s, the project asks how and why people wounded or bereaved by terrorist violences formed groups and initiatives to address issues related to their suffering.

Combining the language of the Bordieuan field theory with approaches of Social Movement History and the Narrative Turn, the study zooms in on the complex circumstances under which terrorism survivors did or didn’t succeed in creating visibility and agency. It looks at the survivors’ interactions with public players like the government and the media, who did (or did not) react to the new political stakeholders, based on their own sets of intrinsic logics and interests. Since the relationship between victims of terrorism and different social fields is not only defined situationally but must be explained in the context of historically shaped national and transnational processes, the project also zooms out and asks for the impact of long-term national path dependencies in relation to transnational and global developments such as the growing attention to the psychological consequences of violence and crime-victims since the 1970s. The broad time frame allows to challenge the prevailing narrative that this ‘turn to the victim’ was the beginning of a linear success story.