Research

Current Book Project

The Ethics of Victimhood: How Victimhood Can Be a Positive Political Resource (tentative)

This book project, based on my dissertation, develops a normative theory of victimhood that reclaims its political potential while addressing its ethical complexity. Challenging dominant views that portray victimhood as politically disempowering or destructive, I argue that, when engaged responsibly, victimhood can serve as a valuable political resource in resisting oppression. Grounded in the acknowledgment of universal human vulnerability, I conceptualize victimhood as a dynamic recognition of the unequal distribution of vulnerability experiences, rather than as a fixed identity. This recognition can enhance victims’ political agency and enable affective communication, thereby contributing to collective resistance.

Building on this account, I propose a normative framework for evaluating how victims engage their suffering and victim status. Rejecting both non-evaluative approaches and frameworks that focus solely on the imperative to avoid political uses of victimhood, I argue that victims may bear political responsibilities to engage their victimhood in ways that align with resistance to their oppression. To support this claim, I develop three model evaluative tests, accompanied by qualifying conditions that account for differences in types of harm, epistemic capacity, and social position within power structures.

By reorienting ethical discourse on victimhood toward the political goal of undermining injustice, this book offers a politically intentional ethics that guides, supports, and carefully assesses victims’ efforts to mobilize their suffering for transformative political action. 

Publications

2025, "Victimhood as a Positive Political Resource," European Journal of Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851241308809 

Abstract: Victimhood is commonly deemed negative. The dominant account of victimhood argues that leveraging victimhood involves asserting the moral superiority of the weak, leading to an oversimplification of complex political matters into moral binaries of good versus evil. According to this perspective, victimhood traps victims in a perennial position of weakness, thereby diminishing their agency. This paper challenges this negative perspective and argues that victimhood can enhance agency, serving as a positive political resource. When victimhood involves the acknowledgment of inherent vulnerability shared by all individuals, whether they are victims or non-victims, and concerns the unjust distributions of vulnerability experiences, it can empower individuals to overcome excessive self-doubt and transform their victimization into a political agenda. By examining the subway protests organized by Korean Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination activists, I demonstrate how recognizing the agency-enhancing potential of victimhood helps us better understand the political significance of these actions.

Keywords: victimhood; vulnerability; protest; disability; agency

Work in Progress

"Challenging Emotional Privilege: Provocative Resistance as Affective Communication"

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that provocative resistance—disruptive, offensive, and confrontational tactics used by the oppressed—can function as affective communication. Drawing on feminist theories of vulnerability, I argue that such actions induce intense discomfort, such as anger, shock, anxiety, and humiliation, in privileged audiences, producing an embodied, though imperfect, awareness of oppression’s affective toll. This communicative value is intrinsic: the discomfort itself is the message, not merely a means of persuasion, disclosure, or negotiation. Two recent South Korean cases—subway disruptions by disability rights activists and online radical feminist activism that employs offensive tactics—illustrate how provoking discomfort pierces the affective insulation of the privileged and shifts their relationship to certain harms from abstract and external to immediate and real. I specify conditions for legitimacy: provocations must be situated within a clear and relevant political message and avoid inflicting direct harm on individuals. I also address two objections—counterproductivity and moral impermissibility. The argument clarifies a communicative dilemma for the oppressed between persuasion and affective communication, and articulates an ethic for how the privileged should confront and work through their affective vulnerability. 

Keywords: provocative resistance; affective communication; affective vulnerability; emotional privilege; communicative dilemma

"Do Governments Have a Responsibility to Support Counter-Speech?"

Abstract: This paper argues that governments have a responsibility to support the counter-speech of hate speech victims, particularly in institutional settings such as schools and workplaces. Hate speech can silence its targets, especially when they lack the resources to respond effectively. Drawing on Seana Shiffrin's thinker-based theory of freedom of speech, I argue that this silencing undermines victims' moral agency—their ability to develop and express personal perspectives, beliefs, and principles through speech—particularly in contexts crucial to individual development and social participation. Because safeguarding moral agency is a fundamental governmental responsibility, addressing the silencing effects of hate speech is essential. However, punitive measures against hate speech are inconsistent with the thinker-based framework. I therefore propose a policy approach centered on supporting victims' counter-speech. To illustrate how this responsibility might be fulfilled, I refine Katherine Gelber’s "speaking back" policy, which calls on governments to provide institutional, material, and educational support to enable victims to respond. I suggest two theoretical modifications: first, the thinker-based framework offers a stronger normative foundation for this policy than Gelber’s reliance on the capabilities approach; second, it should consider the possibility that counter-speech may itself take the form of hate speech. 

Keywords: hate speech; counter-speech; speaking back policy; freedom of speech; thinker-based theory

In Preparation

"Law and Ordinary People: Revisiting the Concept of Law from Below"

This paper proposes a theoretical revision of H. L. A. Hart's legal positivism by highlighting an active role that ordinary citizens play in sustaining a legal system.

"Rethinking Resistance: Victimhood and Agency in Feminist Perspective" (invited chapter for an edited volume)

This chapter challenges masculinist conceptions of resistance and reinterprets the role of victimhood in shaping women's political agency within collective resistance.