Search Results

This chapter examines the potential roles of intergroup representations, threat, and trust in the dynamics of intergroup relations between Whites and Blacks. It first explores the psychological processes that promote intergroup bias, threat, and distrust and may lead to intergroup conflict. Second, it examines ways of reducing intergroup bias. Third, it emphasizes the importance of understanding the differing perspectives of majority- and minority-group members on intergroup relations, and illustrates the different dynamics empirically, focusing on Black-White relations within the United States as a case study. The chapter concludes by considering the implications that this conceptualization of the nature and dynamics of intergroup bias has for interventions designed to reduce bias and promote reconciliation.

This chapter highlights three stepping stones for success in interventions for violent intergroup conflicts: investigating when and how intergroup contact results in reduced prejudice and improved intergroup relations; promoting intergroup forgiveness to replace bitterness and vengeance; and building trust across the sectarian divide. It highlights some of the contributions of social psychology to building the postconflict society envisaged by the Belfast Agreement. The chapter begins by reviewing the historical and social background to the political violence in Northern Ireland. It considers the segregated nature of society in Northern Ireland, and highlights intergroup contact as a means to overcome the problems of segregation. It then considers the neglected topic of forgiveness, arguing that a distinct form of intergroup forgiveness is relevant in cases of intergroup conflict.

This chapter examines the thesis that intergroup conflict may incite needs that can be met through intergroup reconciliation. In particular, it reviews research that suggests three needs that are particularly salient during intergroup conflict — the need for self-esteem, the need to belong, and the need for self-integrity — can also be fulfilled through intergroup reconciliation. In other words, intergroup conflict may motivate social-psychological needs that can be conducive to intergroup reconciliation.

This chapter discusses how social- psychological processes influence intergroup conflict and how these processes can be used in interventions aimed at improving relations between former adversaries. It reviews psychological theory and research that offers insights into these processes and suggest ways that this information can guide diplomatic interventions.

This chapter explores the factors that cause and nurture intractable conflict between enduring groups, examines the implications of a focus on peaceful coexistence, and relates this perspective to theories of conflict resolution and reconciliation. The ultimate aim is to address the question about why ethnic and cultural conflict is so prevalent and persistent and suggest approaches to improve intergroup relations. To support its position, the chapter draws on observations and research on peace programs involving ethnic groups consumed by intractable conflict, groups involving immigrants and hosts, and ethnic groups living on the island of Hawaii.

This chapter presents a framework for thinking about intergroup relations that can be immediately useful to people who are confronted with these issues in their daily lives. It suggests that downward spirals in intergroup relations are a product of egosystem motivational dynamics, and that ecosystem dynamics can create upward spirals in intergroup relations. In doing so, the chapter does not advocate abandoning attempts to change stereotypes and prejudice, or alter power and status relations; rather, it seeks to explore where individuals caught in these processes have leverage to create positive dynamics in their intergroup relations.

This chapter distinguishes between destructive conflicts that have the characteristic of a competitive struggle and constructive conflicts that are more similar to cooperative problem solving. It views reconciliation as predicated on constructive dialogue about the past, present, and future, and enumerates the principles that need to exist for such a dialogue to occur.

This chapter examines the literature on intergroup contact as a means of reducing bias among rival groups in conflict. The basis is the Contact Hypothesis, the leading theory in the field, which specifies the conditions for successful intergroup contact in face-to-face settings. The chapter describes how these conditions can be set out in online intergroup meetings, and goes on to discuss moderators and mediators of intergroup contact effects, and explain how these variables operate in online interactions. The chapter demonstrates how the specific characteristics of computer-mediated communication, ranging from disembodied, text-based interaction to (re)embodied, avatar-based interaction, can be used as a strategic tool to enhance intergroup contact. Based on this theoretical framework, the structure and evaluation results of organized online intergroup encounters in conflict regions are considered. The chapter concludes with an agenda for empirical studies on online intergroup contact to guide further research in this area.

This chapter describes an approach developed to promote reconciliation between Tutsis and Hutus in the aftermath of the horrific genocide in Rwanda. The approach, the research conducted to evaluate it, and the varied uses of it, or of aspects of it in the course of work in Rwanda are discussed. The use of the approach in seminars/workshops/trainings with people in the community, with journalists, with national leaders, with community leaders, and in weekly and monthly radio programs are described. It emphasizes the importance of both healing after group violence, and understanding the roots of violence as avenues to the prevention of new violence and to reconciliation. As a background, the general principles of reconciliation are briefly discussed.

This chapter examines the notion that humans became cooperative because in our ancestral environments we interacted frequently with the same group of close kin, among whom tit-for-tat and other strategies consistent with reciprocal altruism were sufficient to support cooperative outcomes. To this end, the chapter reviews the available archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggesting that most humans had frequent contact with a substantial number of individuals beyond the immediate family despite the existence of isolated groups. This conclusion is consistent with data on the extent of genetic differentiation among ethnographic foragers. The chapter then considers evidence that ancestral humans engaged in frequent and exceptionally lethal intergroup conflicts, as well as data implying that social order in prestate small-scale societies was sustained by a process of coordinated peer pressures and punishment. It shows that prehistoric human society was a social and natural environment in which group competition could have given rise to altruistic behaviors.

This chapter focuses on how conflicts are managed between different groups for a sample of forty-nine nomadic forager societies. It links conflict and conflict management within groups to the same pair of behaviors when they take place between groups. The analysis requires dealing with a large evolutionary picture, which at the level of phylogenetics involves behavioral preadaptations, and at the level of culture and psychology involves people making generalizations that allow predictable, highly routinized peacemaking within groups to serve as a generalizable model for the less predictable conflict management that takes place between groups. The chapter begins by focusing on human hunter-gatherers and on chimpanzees and bonobos—the two African great apes with whom we share the greatest amount of DNA—to see what these three species are capable of in matters related to intergroup conflict and its management, and social control. After isolating some relevant social-sanctioning behaviors that were likely in our shared ancestor, a larger question is asked: how could becoming moral have changed us, in our species' potential for both external conflict and external peacemaking?

This chapter contends that experimental social psychology — particularly that dealing with intergroup relations — is shaped by multicultural political sensibilities. Multiculturalism is based on the expectation of intergroup conflict, and as such is incompatible with individual-centered social psychological theories that emphasize individualism, integration, and assimilation. Given that political psychology uses experimental investigations based largely on college student samples, the field is not well situated to assess the external validity of multicultural- and individual-centered approaches. As an illustration, the chapter presents evidence indicating it is problematic to make universal claims of an “incompatibility” between ethnic and national identities, instead suggesting that the relationship between these identities is highly nuanced and contextualized. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that cross-talk between psychology and political science may be helpful in overcoming these difficulties, providing a healthy, generative stimulus for the development of the field as a whole.

Intergroup emotions are emotions derived from self-categorization as a member of a social group rather than from individual definitions of self. Intergroup emotions theory (IET) proposes the existence and influence of such emotions in the attempt to understand the bewildering variety and apparent senselessness of intergroup conflict and its expression. This chapter reviews the theoretical origins of IET, evidence supporting the existence and importance of intergroup emotions, as well as how intergroup emotion functions as a self-regulatory (and group-regulatory) system. The combination of theoretical precision and supportive empirical evidence makes IET a powerful and useful perspective for understanding collective emotion, collective action, and intergroup relations.

This chapter focuses on the role of different collective emotional elements in creating, preserving, and resolving intractable conflicts. The main premise is that collective emotions play a pivotal role in shaping individual and societal responses to conflicting events as well as in contributing to the evolvement of social contexts that maintain the emotional climate and collective emotional orientation that have developed. The chapter deals mainly with the mutual relations between long-term emotions as part of the context of the conflict (i.e., collective emotional orientation, emotional sentiments, and emotional climate) and group-based emotions evoked as individual-level reactions to conflict-related events. Finally, in addition to describing the emotional process which takes place within an intractable conflict, it will also introduce strategies of collective emotion regulation as a possible path for constructive conflict resolution.

Studying relationships among primate social groups poses a number of logistical challenges: encounters between groups occur relatively infrequently, interactions are often fast-paced and hectic and, unless all the social groups in a study area are habituated, the presence of human observers may have a significant impact on the outcome of intergroup conflicts. This chapter encourages a more focused approach to the study of intergroup interactions by detailing methods that researchers can use to facilitate inter-specific and inter-site comparisons. It begins by clarifying some of the terms commonly used to describe intergroup relationships, followed by a discussion of observational and experimental methods used to study interactions between primate social groups, and a review of methods for analyzing the impact of intergroup interactions on ranging patterns and space use. It concludes with a brief outline of some important avenues for future research.

As this concluding chapter demonstrates, the memories and experiences of Georgianization during the Soviet decades and duties to the fellow Abkhaz applied to all members of this traditionally strong community, but not all mobilized on behalf of their group. Many escaped the fighting in and outside of Abkhazia, even if they shared in the collective historical grievances, and some returned to leadership positions in post-war Abkhazia, in contrast to the prediction of the social reputation costs of nonparticipation in the war. Existing mobilization theories do not explain why the ordinary Abkhaz adopted different mobilization trajectories, from pre-war activism to participation in the Abkhaz war effort and defense of the Abkhaz victory after the war. These trajectories varied dramatically at the war's onset as people hid, fled, or joined the fighting alone or with others in their locales or areas of high-intensity fighting. The ways in which threat is framed at the war's onset influences how people understand their roles during and after the war in the context of social networks that mobilize together. Collective historical memory evolved through the observation of and participation in these forms of collective action before the war, to shape collective conflict identities among networks of relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who experienced the conflict together as part of their broader group. Mobilization is therefore an ongoing process, in which collective threat framing helps grasp individual decisions in the uncertainty of violence onset, but which extends beyond this moment to pre-war everyday confrontation, political contention, and violent opposition that inform collective action when the war begins, and wartime and post-war participation in the conflict where collective conflict identities transform as people adapt to the new realities of intergroup conflict.

This chapter discusses the author's research design. The chapter explains that the goal is to understand how ordinary people experience mobilization across the pre-war, wartime, and post-war stages of intergroup conflict. It talks about the research sites the author visited in the East: Tqvarchal/Tqvarcheli, Gal/I, and Sukhum/I, and the West: Gudata, Gagra, and Pitsunda. Gal/I district an agricultural district that was populated by nearly all Mingelian, a subgroup opted recorded as Georgian in the Soviet statistics. Tqvarchal/Tqvarcheli is a mining town at its center that had an Abkhaz majority. Sukhum/I is the capital of Abkhazia and is home to a relatively diverse yet dominated by Georgian population. Gagra was a mixed urban center with a large Armenian presence. Gudauta is where Lykhnashta is located. It is historically where the Abkhaz gathered to address the group's concerns. It was in Guadata that during the war, the Abkhaz had access to some weapons of the former Soviet military base. The participants to the study are individuals who were recruited into Abkhaz movement organizations, those who mobilized for war spontaneously, and those who did not fight in the war. The research process involved participant observation, triangulation, and interviews about the participant's childhood, what it was like living before the war, their wartime experiences, and what it was like to deal with post-war conflict.

This introductory chapter begins by illustrating the events that started the Georgian–Abkhaz war of 1992–1993. It presents the question that the book aims to answer: How do ordinary people navigate uncertainty to make mobilization decisions in civil war? How did the Abkhaz go from the uncertainty created by the events of mid-August 1992 to a range of decisions about whether and in what capacity to mobilize? Why did some join the war effort, while others escaped the fighting? The book argues that people come to perceive threat in different ways. They act differently based on whom they understand to be threatened and mobilize to protect their own safety, family and friends, or broader segments of society. To understand how people make difficult decisions under conditions of uncertainty brought on by war, the author turns to face-to-face, immersive research with the actors in Abkhaz mobilization. She conducted fieldwork over eight months in 2010–2013, primarily in Abkhazia, but also in Georgia and Russia. The chapter gives a background of pre-war Abkhazia and the intergroup conflict that arose due to Georgianization, and the futility of Abkhaz resistance to it. It discusses the uncertainty that the ordinary Abkhaz felt at the onset of the war. They did not know whether and in what capacity to mobilize on behalf of their group. The author discusses three approaches to civil war mobilization: the relative deprivation approach, the collective action approach, and the strategic interaction approach. These three approaches address different aspects of the historical, social, and structural context of Abkhaz mobilization. The author proposes that we should rethink our approaches to mobilization to better capture the process that relates uncertainty to a range of decisions about whether and in what capacity to mobilize.