Response to ‘The Epistemic Harms of National Humiliation’ by Raamy Majeed

Abstract Raamy Majeed (2025) wants to draw our attention away from humiliation as an emotion in international politics, to look at the narratives around humiliation. Such narratives, he argues, generate previously unexamined forms of epistemic injustice, which apply both to out-groups and in-groups. Exploring the role that epistemic injustice might play in national humiliation narratives is an important contribution to our understanding of the harms of these narratives, but I argue that Majeed has not shown that there is epistemic injustice in several of the cases he examines. I also suggest that more could be done to explain how to address narratives of national humiliation, but this will require revising his commitment to only analysing narratives and not the truth of those narratives.