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This chapter examines the violent maintenance of citizenship through the police state, and the uses of hate crime legislation to both name and disallow any recognition of this violence. The intervention into how we understand citizenship to be violently organized functions at two interconnected levels, that is, at the structural level of state violence, and at the social level of identity categories. At the level of the state, hate crime legislation offers us important information on how the violence of citizenship is managed, controlled, and directed. At the structural level of the state, the chapter adds to left critiques of hate crime legislation by unpacking how these laws are used to create a dangerous discontinuum, in which hate crimes are marked as individualized errors, while police brutality is systemically assuaged. By examining the machinations of hate crime legislation at these two levels, it is argued that hate crime legislation works, simultaneously, to recognize and deny: (1) the violence of citizenship; and (2) the fear that the oppressed will seek revenge and retaliate for this experience by using violence themselves.

Hate crime legislation is established in many countries across the world, and the term ‘hate crime’ is widely applied in political and scholarly settings. While there seem to be widespread international agreement that hate crime requires particular legal responses, important questions remain. From a philosophical point of view, there are two basic questions. The first is conceptual: What exactly counts as a hate crime? The second is normative: What makes hate crimes particularly serious? This chapter distinguishes a number of answers to both of these questions and explores how they connect. The aim is to promote greater clarity, in order to avoid confusion, increase comparability, and better understand disagreements about hate crime globally.

The chapter focuses on the problematical aspect of the legislative response to hate crime phenomenon in the Turkish case. It principally draws attention to the exclusion of historically stigmatized communities from hate crime legislation. By addressing the continuing discriminatory state policies it is argued that the construction and reproduction of the ‘ideal citizen’ raise the question of the legitimacy of victimhood of particular groups. The idea of the ‘legitimate victim’ thus outshines and normalizes the vulnerability and victimization of ethnic and sexual minorities in the Turkish legislative system. The central regulation in Turkish law proscribing hate-motivated conduct accordingly fails to encompass ethnicity and sexual orientation as protected characteristics. This selective understanding of victimhood in law enforcement in Turkey also leads to the trivialization of hate-motivated violence against already marginalized communities due to their distinct ethnic and sexual identities.

Sylvia Lancaster is Chief Executive of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a campaigning charitable organisation formed in the wake of the murder of her daughter, Sophie, in August 2007. Sophie was targeted solely because her attackers took violent exception to her ‘alternative’, gothic appearance. In this interview Sylvia outlines the Foundation's key principles and aims and objectives, and reflects upon its growth thus far. She describes the innovative methods she has used to develop the Foundation's activities and raise its profile, including working in partnership with numerous organisations from the business, criminal justice and charitable sectors, and assesses how successful they have been. She also outlines how over the next few years the Foundation will continue to work towards its twin goals of challenging all forms of prejudice and getting the criminal justice system to recognise the victimisation of alternatives as a hate crime.

This chapter studies the “winning streak” of the LGBT movement against the Religious Right during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Between 1997 and 2003, more campaigns than ever before used tactics such as voter identification, large-scale use of volunteers, and narrow messaging. Campaign victories had a “domino effect” on other areas, such as increased lesbian and gay visibility in mainstream media, the passage of numerous state hate-crimes legislation, and passage of nondiscrimination legislation. The chapter analyzes events that happened in Michigan during this period as a case study to demonstrate the use of campaign tactics in “battleground” states.