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Social psychology has made noteworthy contributions to the analysis of international conflict in the perceptual and cognitive areas, although the extent of these contributions to explaining causation and escalation is a matter of some debate. Nonetheless, the operation of self-serving biases, selective and distorted perceptions, stereotypes, and mirror images have been implicated in the processes of intense and destructive conflict between identity groups and states. Furthermore, the effects of errors in cognitive attributions, the self-fulfilling prophecy, and various biases induced by the need for cognitive consistency have rendered this a rich area of analysis and application. Finally, heuristics and biases in the processes of social judgement and choice have been implicated in the exacerbation of international conflict. In addition, there are various factors in group functioning (e.g., groupthink) that may reduce the rationality and effectiveness of decision making in stressful situations of conflict. This paper will review some of the theory and research in these areas, while at the same time acknowledging the potential limitations in terms of research methodology and external validity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychology has had an increasing influence on constructivist research in recent years. Scholars have utilised a range of insights from the discipline of psychology to develop an emerging research programme focusing on the intersection of these fields. This paper engages with one specific area of psychology, the social identity approach in social psychology. I outline the contributions that can be gained from an enhanced engagement with this perspective. Whilst constructivist utilisation of psychology has largely been of a cognitive nature, often focusing on the individual attributes of leaders, the social identity approach draws together both cognitive and social elements, looking beyond the individual to social group memberships. I aim to demonstrate what this stimulating area of social psychology has to offer constructivist research and on what terms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature on global civil society assume that progressive movement(s) need(s) to be fixed into commonly agreed upon interests and strategies that make up a stable identity of the movement as a whole. Often, these movements rely upon taken-for-granted speech acts whereby interests and desires are articulated through language, vocal language. By reducing our senses to rational speech acts, we undermine the progressive potential of other forms of sensory language. For this reason, I attempt to provide a polemical reading on the potential of silence(s) as moments and sites of agency. Thus, this paper goes beyond mainstream literature on social movements, and attempts to (re)locate potential for agency within the silent word. The written word becomes that "knowledge [which] is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting,"a space for one own, on paper, on walls, where none existed before. Included in the paper will be a brief analytical section on the problematics of social movements in relying on vocal speech acts as sites of agency. Thereafter, I begin from the premise that useful theoretical frameworks can be drawn from literary works themselves, particularly the ways in which silence manifests itself as a mode of political resistance. This paper will look at how two strangers in two separate novels create spaces of their own by narrating a reading of resistance that resist dominant structures of speech acts. Moments of silence are indeed vague, but they come with potential for something surprising and unexpected by offering possibilities for agency, even within global movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this presentation Daniel Rothbart examines as a source of conflict the impact of threat narratives on the social psychology of conflict protagonists. In periods of protracted conflict protagonists tend to essentialize the Other in normative terms, denigrating them as inherently uncivilized, savage, subhuman, or demonic. Mythic stories about their impure origins foster negative images of the degenerate and malicious deeds. These forms of dehumanization of the Other are contrasted against the purity and inherent goodness of the ingroup. In the context of protracted conflict such a duality of group identities fosters notions of the inevitability of conflict and the need for violence. The following themes are developed in this presentation: (1) in the context of protracted social conflict the transition from polimodal identities to a single, dominant identity establishes a seemingly fixed opposition between “We” and “They”; (2) such an opposition is defined by categories of virtues and vices, conferring on group identities an axiology of difference; (3) a major source of retaliation and revenge rests on the influence of axiological identity and difference. In context of protracted conflict this axiology of identity and difference becomes sacrosanct, achieving an aura of transcendent truth. The struggle against a threatening Other is “necessary” but never completely finalized. In cycles of violence, a threat-logic includes a demand for security that is never actually attained, and a hope for peace through the strategies of perpetual conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]