You are kindly invited to join us for the following guest lecture in the AREA Occasional Lecture Series by AREA Ruhr Visiting Professor Jie-Hyun Lim from Sogang University, Seoul. The lecture will be conducted in-person only. Please find information on how to attend at the end of this post.
AREA Occasional Lecture Series
Prof. Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University, Seoul)
Victimhood Nationalism: Entangled Memories of War and Genocide in Global Easts – on the Eastern-Central Europe and East Asia
Date: 23 October 2026
Time: 11.15 AM – 12.45 PM CEST
Abstract
What underlies the violence of today’s conflicts – such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine – that some observers describe as genocidal? In his recent book Victimhood Nationalism (2025, Columbia University Press), the global historian and memory studies scholar Jie-Hyun Lim offers a searching answer. Such tragedies, he argues, are almost always preceded by “memory wars,” struggles that fester in an unsettled past of unhealed trauma and failed reconciliation. Lim defines “victimhood nationalism” as a narrative template – one that grants a nation moral superiority and political legitimacy maneuvering on a legacy of ancestral suffering. People of this hereditary victimhood come to see themselves as inherently justified in their actions and unquestionably entitled to their ontological righteousness. The globalization of memory, rather than guaranteeing transnational solidarity, often sharpens nations’ rivalries over their entangled past. Worse, this rivalry devolves into a distasteful competition over whose nation has suffered more. It regrettably reduces the complexities of human suffering to the vulgar politics of numbers. Victimhood nationalism instrumentalizes, objectifies, and dehumanizes the very victims it claims to revere, turning them into mere historical assets and symbolic capital. More seriously, victimhood nationalism is not confined to the memory domain; it is actively deployed as a weapon for emotional mobilization in contemporary conflicts. Hopefully, this critique can help foster a global memory regime for mnemonic solidarity and historical reconciliation, by sacrificing victimhood nationalism.
About the Speaker
Jie-Hyun Lim is a Distinguished Professor at Sogang University. In September and October 2026, he stays with AREA Ruhr as guest professor/international research fellow. Lim has been visiting professor/fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), Bielefeld University, University or Warsaw, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, Paris III, Hitotsubashi University, Columbia University, Harvard-Yenching, Williams College, and others. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age (Columbia University Press, 2025), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach, 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia University Press, 2022), and Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021, co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft). He is the founder/leader of the global consortium of ‘Global Easts’ and the editor of the “Global Easts” series at the CEU Press.
Physical participation:
AREA Ruhr
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Geibelstr. 41
Room SG 183
map: https://www.uni-due.de/imperia/md/content/abz/lageplan_sg055_campus_duisburg.pdf