Sandra Penic

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.

Traumatised Selves: Does War Trauma Facilitate In-Group Bonding and Out-Group Distancing?

This chapter discusses the role of communities in attributions of responsibility for the traumatising experience of war. A major challenge for post-war reconstruction is posed by the assignment of collective guilt to entire ethnic groups. The study presented in this chapter explores the level of traumatisation in two groups that were recently in conflict – the Croats and Serbs - their perception of collective guilt and their present inter-group relationships. On the basis of the existing literature, the authors expected to find a positive link between the level of traumatisation on the one hand and social distance towards the out group or nationalism on the other hand. The authors then wonder to what extent this relation is mediated by group-oriented processes, such as identification with one’s own ethnic group and group-based emotion of collective guilt assignment. Their findings show that the relationship is not as straightforward as one might have expected. War trauma appears to instigate a complex pattern of inter-group attitudes and emotions ; whereas it is directly related to negative out-group attitudes, trauma also influences the interpretation about the other group being responsible as a whole for the personal and collective hurt. Although there are somewhat different patterns of strength of selected mediators in Croatian and Serbian samples, findings about the importance of one specific group-based emotion - collective guilt assignment - is fairly firm and well grounded. The results show that this emotional response, either partially or completely, mediates the association between war-related traumatic experiences and (negative) out-group attitudes. Therefore, these results could have important implications for future intergroup relations of the antagonised groups and for the processes of social reconstruction.

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.

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.