ABSTRACT
This chapter asks how, why, and where we might study survivors of political violence and terrorism (PVT). Addressing these issues, respectively, the chapter provides a way of traversing the vast and complex definitional terrain of PVT. It then argues that victims and survivors of such violence represent important actors with regrettably intimate vantage points from which to reflect directly on the experience of feeling, witnessing, or suffering PVT and its aftermaths. Despite this, they are often selectively overlooked in both mainstream political discourse and ‘critical’ studies of PVT, where their views or narratives may be unpalatable to the prevailing or aspirational worldviews of relevant actors, including political elites. Connecting this chapter with the first, it is argued that the work and ideas of philosopher Ian Hacking concerning language, action, and historically dynamic ontology offer valuable provocations for thinking about resilience from a number of simultaneous angles. His work on ‘making up people’, from which this book derives its subtitle, is introduced to readers ahead of subsequent empirical chapters.
