Dying for a reason: Mobilizing Backlash after Disaster Events

Martyrs play a crucial role in most social movements, as do their visual depictions. They embody a link between grievances, indignation, and political action: as victims, they testify to unjust treatment and social problems; as heroes, they testify to the moral worth of a cause and the importance of acting, even at the price of self-sacrifice. The theme of martyrdom constitutes one of the threads that connects contemporary mobilization processes in West Asia and North Africa to the 2011 uprisings. Like Khaled Said and Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010, today, those killed in massacres and state-engineered catastrophes are routinely recast as martyrs to support emancipatory struggles. Thereby, social movements attempt to transform the horror of deadly catastrophes into a moral commitment to continued resistance by portraying survivors as heroes of endurance. Killings and death become sources of indignation that encourage resilience and resistance, rather than demobilization. This paper explores the process by which the victims of non-repressive mass violence are cast as martyrs for the purpose of social mobilization. In contrast to previous works on the conditions of backlash mobilisation, we deliberately refrain from examining death and violence caused by repression. Instead, we focus on two instants of non-repressive and unintentional, yet state-facilitated violence that resulted in a massive loss of life and sparked attempts at social mobilisation. With the Derna dam collapse on 10 September 2023 in Eastern Libya, the 2023 Earthquake in Turkey, and the Beirut Port explosion on 4 August 2020, we compare three cases of deadly catastrophes where state neglect and absent accountability where directly responsible in creating the conditions for loss of life on a mass scale and examine the conditions that enabled or constrained civil society actors from capitalizing on these events for mass.