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Ethos of Conflict and Beyond: Differentiating Social Representations of Conflict

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The Social Psychology of Intractable Conflicts

Part of the book series: Peace Psychology Book Series ((PPBS,volume 27))

Abstract

Bar-Tal’s (1998, 2007) “ethos of conflict” is a powerful concept to account for the socially shared nature of conflict-supporting beliefs in societies involved in protracted conflict. We first briefly review studies on ethos of conflict and its consequences in the Jewish Israeli society and other societies that have used Bar-Tal’s conceptualization. Then we introduce our own approach, which builds on social representations theory (Moscovici, Psychoanalysis: Its Image And Its Public, 1961/1976) and a recent conceptualization of political ideology (Cohrs Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, pp. 53–71, 2012). Our approach adopts a more bottom-up strategy that considers specific belief contents related to conflict and can account for qualitative differences within a society. We argue that it is important to go beyond distinguishing between people, who are high versus low on a dimension of ethos of conflict and to identify qualitatively different ideological subgroups in a conflict. To achieve this, we rely on Q methodological techniques. We illustrate the feasibility and usefulness of our approach by summarizing results from studies on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and the Israel–Palestine conflict as represented by conflict outsiders, namely Swiss residents. Finally, we discuss the relative merits and shortcomings of the different approaches to conflict-related shared beliefs, possibilities for their integration, and some suggestions for future research in this area.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ongoing research by the second author of this chapter extends the study presented here by examining viewpoints of political delegates, journalists, and scholars in addition to laypeople.

  2. 2.

    Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan/Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the “armed wing” of the Kurdish national movement.

  3. 3.

    Gayer (2012), in a Q methodological study on national identity constructions among Israeli Jews and Palestinians, recently also found two Q factors on each side of the Israel–Palestine conflict.

  4. 4.

    Of course, the empirical measures of ethos of conflict also have to be developed on a case-to-case basis, sensitive to the particular context.

  5. 5.

    The first and second authors of this chapter are currently addressing this issue in relation to the Kurdish conflict.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    J. Christopher Cohrs, Özden Melis Uluğ & Reşit Kışlıoğlu

  2. Institute of Sociology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Lea Stahel

Authors
  1. J. Christopher Cohrs
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  2. Özden Melis Uluğ
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  3. Lea Stahel
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  4. Reşit Kışlıoğlu
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Correspondence to J. Christopher Cohrs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center in Herzilya, Herzilya, Israel

    Eran Halperin

  2. Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Keren Sharvit

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Cohrs, J., Uluğ, Ö., Stahel, L., Kışlıoğlu, R. (2015). Ethos of Conflict and Beyond: Differentiating Social Representations of Conflict. In: Halperin, E., Sharvit, K. (eds) The Social Psychology of Intractable Conflicts. Peace Psychology Book Series, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17861-5_3

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