Guy Elcheroth

SPATIALLY WEIGHTED CONTEXT DATA AND THEIR APPLICATION TO COLLECTIVE WAR EXPERIENCES

In this article, we introduce spatially weighted context data as a new approach for studying the contextual dimension of factors that shapes social behavior and collective worldviews. First, we briefly discuss the current contribution of multilevel regression to the study of contextual effects. We subsequently provide a formal definition of spatially weighted context data, as a complement to and extension of the existing multilevel analyses, which allows the study of contextual influences that decrease with increasing distance, rather than contextual influences that are bound within discrete contexts. To show how spatially weighted context data can be generated and used in practice, we present a research application about the impact of the collective experiences of war across the former Yugoslavia. Using geographically stratified survey data from the Transition to Adulthood and Collective Experiences Survey (TRACES), we illustrate how empirical conclusions about the collective impact of war events vary as a function of the scale at which context effects are being modeled. Furthermore, we show how observed geographic patterns can be explained by underlying patterns of social proximity between the concerned populations, and we propose a procedure to estimate the part of spatial dependency explained by models applying specific definitions of social proximity. In the final section, we discuss the boundary conditions for the use of spatially weighted context data and summarize the contribution of the proposed approach to existing methods for the study of context effects in the social sciences.

'Not our war, not our country': contents and contexts of Scottish political rhetoric and popular understandings during the invasion of Iraq.

Recent research has questioned the traditional assumption that populations inevitably rally round their national leaders in times of war and suggested instead that whether this occurs depends upon political communication and mass media coverage. In this study, we provide systematic analysis of the debate in Scotland over the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We examine how the conflict was construed as either for or against the national interest, and how the way this is done is linked to different dimensions of context. First, we provide a mixed-methods analysis of debates in the Scottish Parliament. We show that anti-war speakers from Scottish separatist parties map opposition to the war onto a series of collectively consistent and temporarily flexible categorical oppositions, starting with a familiar antinomy between Scottish people and British rulers (before the invasion), and then shifting to broader oppositions between subjugated people and imperial powers (after the invasion). By contrast, speakers from other parties appear less consistent and less flexible in the nature of their arguments. Second, we examine the opinions of a population sample on the war, how these opinions relate to understandings of Scottish identity and how the media context is pivotal in the translation of anti-war opinions into votes for separatist/anti-war political parties.

When Is Collective Exposure to War Events Related to More Acceptance of Collective Guilt

Previous studies adopting the collective vulnerability approach have shown that condemnation of war atrocities is grounded in communal experiences of victimization and is strongest in locations where victimization was spread across ethnic boundaries. Based on a representative survey conducted in 2006 (N = 2,012) across the former Yugoslavia, we find a similar pattern for acceptance of collective guilt. While personal victimization does not have a significant impact, the acceptance of guilt is strongest in more war-affected regions. Moreover, the results show the importance of the type of communal-level victimization: acceptance of guilt is lowest in regions marked by asymmetric violence and highest in regions marked by symmetric violence. Our findings suggest that collective victimization should not be treated as a uniform phenomenon and challenge the assumption that rejection of in-group guilt is an inevitable outcome of collective victimization.

Beyond Collective Denial: Public Reactions to Human Rights Violations and the Struggle over the Moral Continuity of Communities

This chapter focuses on a particular aspect of social reconstruction and reconciliation processes: how can institutional frameworks for prosecuting human rights violations help post-war communities to avoid plunging into a climate of anomy, which can be highly detrimental for both individual well-being and render societies more vulnerable to future instability and violence? The creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 was based on the assumptions that the formal prosecution of severe human rights breaches as violations of international law helps to prevent further violence and that it facilitates post-war reconciliation processes. Seeking empirical indications of the impact of trials on communities, the authors propose a framework for analysing the relationships between the institutionalisation of human rights and psychosocial dynamics that are facilitative of their actual implementation, across the former Yugoslavia. Their findings support the assumption that collective reactions to human rights violations reflect public concerns about generalised moral ambiguity. A central motive of these concerns is to avoid a symbolic climate that potentially leads to social disintegration and psychological distress. Those individuals for whom psychological discomfort associated with a sense of anomy is the most salient, as well as those who perceive most vividly the need to preserve fundamental values of the community, are more likely to embrace condemnations of human rights violations. The strongest levels of public support for the prosecution of human rights violations were found within those contexts in which an institutional framework for sanctioning violations is the most salient. Further, the results stress that collective experiences of human rights violations predict moral worldviews when individual experiences are aggregated within communities based on a sense of common identity. These findings are consistent with the idea that symbolic dynamics resulting in collective reactions to human rights violations emerge within communities that are concerned and potentially mobilised by the threat posed to their internal cohesion by outrageous practices, precisely because their members share a relevant identity.

Threatened powers : When blaming "the Others" grows out of internal instability and protest

Once we have established that social and psychological functions of collective out group blame vary across contexts, it becomes important to explain the role of contextual factors more precisely. Two central questions are further investigated in this chapter: Under what circumstances are people prone to resent other groups for past wrongdoings? How is out-group blame related to in-group protest? In both cases, the authors propose an argument that completes or qualifies traditional perspectives on intergroup relations and social conflict. These tend to stress the importance of past victimisation. As a complement to this work, the authors show here that adverse societal circumstances can lay the ground for public mobilisation against out groups, even when these conditions are not a direct consequence of past victimisation caused by external enemies. In the first part of the chapter, the authors focus on the context of the new Croatian nation-state. Levels of social and economic deprivation in Croatia range from relatively low to moderate and are largely connected to direct consequences of ethnicised war. Findings show how these structural particularities have created an opportunity to demobilise system critical opposition: higher levels of social and economic deprivation here lead to stronger out-group blame but not to increased internal protest. Lower levels of popularity of the main left-oriented oppositional party in the most deprived areas partially account for this pattern. In the second part of the chapter, analyses are presented that show that, contrary to findings for Croatia, at a larger scale, internal protest is highest within those regions of the whole former Yugoslavia that have endured the highest level of social and economic deprivation. Furthermore, the highest levels of assignment of collective guilt to other groups can similarly be found in the most deprived regions. Furthermore, the individual-level relationship between internal protest and out-group blame varies significantly between contexts: with increasing rates of social and economic deprivation, these two dimensions of political attitudes become increasingly unrelated. These findings provide an illustration of the way in which societal circumstances of system threat can provide both an opportunity to mobilise the public towards domestic reforms and an impetus for elites to mobilise out-group blame.

Towards a Community Approach of the Aftermath of War in the Former Yugoslavia: Collective Experiences, Social Practices, and Representations

This chapter gives an overview of the main issues tackled in the book. First, it describes in detail why the theoretical project is different from and complementary to both “primordialist” and “elite mobilisation” perspectives of violent political conflicts. The model built around the key notions of social representations and social practices introduces a bottom–up component into constructivist perspectives on “ethnic identity” and political violence. In this view, political violence (re–)creates and (re–)shapes “ethnic identity” (and separation) and does not simply spontaneously flow out of pre–existing communal conflict. Then, we defend the idea that sharing some instruments and a similar societal approach of psychology within an interdisciplinary and international network of social scientists is fruitful, as it enables an empirical and theoretical investigation of complex social practices and representations and an innovative articulation between the individual and the social in relation to victimisation. The second section of this introduction presents the TRACES survey data and fieldwork methodology. In particular, the life calendar methodology and some descriptive findings regarding victimisation on the whole territory of former Yugoslavia since 1990 are presented. In the third and final section, a short summary of each chapter is given.

Can There be a General Theory of Intractable Conflict

In our tribute, we discuss the international influence of Bar-Tal’s work on intergroup conflicts and his objective to develop a general theory of intractable conflict. On one hand, the application of social-psychological theory across contexts is consistent with Bar-Tal’s own metatheoretical approach to abstract more general processes, beyond sociohistorical contingencies. On the other hand, the development of a general theory might contrast with his methodological plea for observing socio-psychological dynamics within their specific societal contexts. We take this creative tension a bit further to discuss how Bar-Tal’s lifetime work problematizes traditional paradigmatic oppositions between fundamental and applied research, or between nomothetic and idiographic approaches in the social science. His multifaceted contribution invites social psychologists to pay more attention to the delicate articulation between universal human motives and particular societal contexts. We argue that further developments of theories of intractable conflicts need to critically question and investigate more systematically the extent of functional universals in psychological reactions to violent conflict. We discuss contextual factors likely to moderate these functions, such as the degree of asymmetry or visibility of a conflict.

Violence: How Collective Shocks Transform Social Practices

We now come to the heart of our concerns: the matter of violence. Where prior research has tended to focus on the question ‘how is violence produced’ we argue that this needs to be complemented by asking ‘what is produced by violence?’ Correspondingly, the core question in this chapter is how violence serves to transform identity.

British Warriors and Scottish Voters: When ‘Rallying the Nation’ Backfires

The ‘Invasion of Iraq’ commonly denotes the period between 20 March 2003, when a military coalition formed mainly by a predominant USA and its most important ally, the UK, entered on Iraqi soil, and 1 May 2003—the day when US President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in a televised address from an aircraft carrier, after seven weeks of quick military progress and the occupation of Baghdad. In Britain the invasion provoked a massive national rally effect. When it started, it looked as if the anti-war mobilisation, which had been very strong during the preceding weeks, had lost its impact almost overnight.

Evil Leaders and Obedient Masses

Let us now turn things around—in more senses than one. If, as we argued in the previous chapter, one cannot explain violent conflict in terms of the deep-seated hostility that members of groups have for each other, then perhaps it has more to do with people doing what others tell them to do. Perhaps conflict is a reflection of the will of elites as channelled through the masses, rather than the will of the masses themselves. Perhaps the perpetrators of violence are simply obeying orders, which only reflect the motives of those who give the orders—and do not reveal more about those who carry them out than their propensity to obey, albeit sometimes in a shockingly thoughtless way.