Persecution Capital: Legitimacy, Trauma, and Political Authority

This article introduces the concept of persecution capital, a form of symbolic capital that operates across overlapping political, cultural and intellectual fields and is derived from lived experiences of political suffering. Building on and extending Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, it examines how persecution can become a central currency of legitimacy, particularly in revolutionary and post-conflict contexts. In settings where institutional legitimacy is eroded, symbolic hierarchies are often recalibrated around histories of harm, allowing suffering to confer moral and epistemic authority. The article examines the workings of persecution capital across Syrian oppositional and cultural fields, conceptualised as transnational and interstitial spaces marked by revolutionary rupture, institutional weakening and moral inflation, all of which contribute to the rise of persecution capital as a key structuring force of legitimacy in the field. Drawing on long-term empirical research with Syrian intellectuals and activists (2017–2025), the analysis shows how persecution capital not only empowers survivors and marginalised actors, but also entrenches exclusionary hierarchies, moral gatekeeping, and competitive victimhood. By foregrounding the symbolic weight of suffering in post-authoritarian legitimacy struggles, the article offers a theoretical contribution to debates on symbolic power, legitimacy, field theory and the moral economies of recognition in fractured political fields.