Competitive victimhood began as a Northern Ireland conflict concept.

Evidence

Competitive victimhood can be conceptualized as a common form of exclusive victim beliefs (i.e., perceived uniqueness of the ingroup’s victimization compared to other groups’ suffering; Vollhardt et al. 2021). This term was first coined to describe group members’ motivation to establish that their ingroup had endured greater injustice and suffering than the other in the context of the violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland (Noor et al. 2008). It was later extended to describe other contexts, including those central to the present analysis— societies where the roles of historical victim and perpetrator groups are broadly accepted. — Nurit Shnabel and Johannes Ullrich, Identity Needs in Intergroup Relations, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes and tensions with the synthesis’s asymmetry claim: perpetrator groups need moral-identity restoration, but competitive victimhood (a victim-framed need display) sits awkwardly in that frame.