The social psychology of collective victimhood

Collective victimhood, which results from the experience of being targeted as members of a group, has powerful effects on individuals and groups. The focus of this Special Issue is on how people respond to collective victimhood and how these responses shape intergroup relations. We introduce the Special Issue with an overview of emerging social psychological research on collective victimhood. To date, this research has focused mostly on destructive versus positive consequences of collective victimhood for relations with an adversary group, and examined victim groups' needs, victim beliefs, and underlying social identity and categorization processes. We identify several neglected factors in this literature, some of which are addressed by the empirical contributions in the current issue. The Special Issue offers novel perspectives on collective victimhood, presenting findings based on a diverse range of methods with mostly community samples that have direct and vicarious experiences of collective harm in different countries

The rhetorical complexity of competitive and common victimhood in conversational discourse

Much current research on collective victimhood acknowledges the role of rhetoric but does not fully address the implications for micro-level variation in personal expressions of victimhood. The focus has tended to be on individual differences in collective victimhood construals where people may either see their group as the sole possessor of victim-status or may incorporate other groups into an inclusive category. While recent research sees a strategic element in some “inclusivity”, we argue that all claims of victimhood are strategic. By using a discursive approach, we show variability in the expression of victimhood and how this accomplishes different activities in conversations. Several focus groups consisting of victims from Northern Ireland were analysed to identify presentations of victimhood and their relation to the unfolding dynamics of the conversation. We demonstrate that presentation of victimhood is an interactional concern, link this to the concept of “needs” and suggest implications this might have

Collective victimhood in populist media about Brexit: rage against the machine?

This paper outlines an ongoing qualitative study in social psychology, with a pilot study completed and the main study currently at the data analysis stage. We examine how collective and competitive victimhood are invoked in populist rhetoric and media coverage of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union (Brexit). Brexit has been portrayed by its proponents as a project on behalf of ordinary British people against an out-of-touch liberal elite and a malevolent European Union (EU), with the opposing campaign to remain in the EU commonly characterised as an alarmist “project fear” (see Bartholomew, 2017; Durrheim et al., 2018; Forsyth, 2016; Malik, 2018). This populist idea of ordinary people as victims of manipulative and mendacious elites seems to relate to social-psychological work on collective and competitive victimhood (Bar-Tal et al., 2009; Noor et al., 2008a, 2008b, 2012; Vollhardt et al., 2014). According to this account, victimhood can be used as political capital to justify grievances and intergroup conflict. Research on this topic has mostly used quantitative methods, but first attempts have been made to use qualitative methods to show rhetorical functions of collective and competitive victimhood (McNeill et al., 2017). Building on these theoretical and methodological foundations, we use thematic analysis and discourse analysis to show how victimhood is mobilised in British media to garner support for Brexit, and how this connects with concepts such as collective relative deprivation (e.g. Abrams & Grant, 2012; Runciman, 1966) and relative gratification (Dambrun et al., 2006; Guimond & Dambrun, 2002; Jetten et al., 2015). In doing so, we contribute to a social-psychological perspective on Brexit, develop further the concepts of collective and competitive victimhood, and connect the micro-level of language used in the media sphere to the macro-level of populist movements in democratic societies

When Victimhood Goes to War? Israel and Victim Claims

Prominent sociopsychological approaches interpret collective victimhood as inseparable, central characteristic of societies involved in intractable conflicts. Victimhood is broadly perceived as an essential conflict‐supportive belief also in other disciplines. In the context of Israel, there is a cross‐disciplinary consensus that collective victimhood is the country's foundational identity. This project argues that states' employment of this theme changes and is context dependent. It discusses under what conditions Israel's political elites incorporate victim narratives towards armed conflicts. It examines public communication during the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense (OPD) and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 (YKW). Employing a modified method of narrative conceptualization analysis, the research demonstrates that victim narratives were used almost twice as much during OPD than during YKW. The findings suggest that we need to differentiate between the role these narratives play for collectives versus states. For the latter, the presence of victim narratives is highly variable and reflects strategic developments. The project is the first systematic study exposing that victim narratives can be a challenge for governance. By conceptualizing victim narratives as claims, it captures the dynamic, contextual characteristics of collective victimhood in state affairs offering a theoretical tool for understanding the political dimension of this identification

Victimhood as a driving force in the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: reflections on collective memory, conflict ethos, and collective emotional orientations.

In intractable conflicts the feelings and claims of victimhood are as mature and well-entrenched as the conflict itself. The longer a conflict is waged, the more the geopolitical reasons for victimisation shift to the psychological. This gradually blurs the difference between facts and perceptions, rendering the conflict harder to resolve (e.g. Coleman 2003; Bar-Tal 2013). The general assumption in this study is that due to unique historical and political circumstances, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict draws heavily — perhaps more than other conflicts — from past and present victimisations to rationalise, justify, and perpetuate the status quo. The study seeks to examine the extent to which the narratives of victimhood add to intractability and therefore hinder settlement. It mainly but not exclusively draws on Bar-Tal’s socio-psychological framework of collective memory, conflict ethos, and collective emotional orientations to guide the discussion. First, the study proposes that Israel’s victimhood draws much of its validity from the Jewish collective memory, especially the Shoah. That among other things gave rise to ethos that established the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of the Jewish continuum of suffering, and not entirely as a political struggle with defined geopolitical causes. It is also proposed that collective memory and the current conflict have established certain emotional responses ranging from soft emotions like guilt and shame, which have subtle but significant reverberations, to strong emotions like fear. Building on Bar-Tal’s claims (2001) that fear dominates Israel’s emotional sate, it is suggested that fear also represents a main force behind Israel’s 'hyper security,’ which is seen as the most destructive manifestation of Israel’s victimhood narratives. Second, it is argued that even though Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish victimhood narratives are socio-psychologically similar, there are factors mainly determined by the conflict power hierarchy which make certain aspects of Palestinian victimhood different and more salient. Whilst Israel’s collective memory is premised on the fear of annihilation, Palestinian memory is mainly centred on the fear of being forgotten. And, whilst Israel’s dominant emotion is fear, Palestinian emotional orientation is largely steered by a sense of collective humiliation. The conflict ethos, as a result, seems to excessively focus on muqawama (resistance) as a reformative measure against humiliation. Even though the societal beliefs about victimhood in Israel or Palestine are not completely homogenous, they are prominent enough to have a detrimental effect on conflict resolution

The problem of agency in the politics of victimhood: Nietzsche, Arendt, and Foucault

Victimhood as socio-political construction of a collective identity and as a rising phenomenon in politics especially in democracies has been problematized by many scholars in regard to the problem of agency. Although the politics of victimhood corresponds to a search for political recognition and correspondingly signifies political agency, the specific kind of relationships it produces carry the risk to result in undercut of agency. There are a number of researches on the functions and consequences of the politics of victimhood, however there is a gap in the literature in terms of examining it in Political Theory at length. In this thesis, the problem of agency in the politics of victimhood is examined under the theoretical framework of Nietzsche, Arendt, and Foucault in order both to investigate the relevancy of the problematizations about the functions and consequences of the politics of victimhood as dangers of undermining agency and to generate new approaches to overcome victimhood and the problem of agency. The analyses present creative values and political action along with different understandings of power, identity, and freedom as to enhance agency and to overcome victimhood

The social psychology of collective victimhood

Collective victimhood, which results from the experience of being targeted as members of a group, has powerful effects on individuals and groups. The focus of this Special Issue is on how people respond to collective victimhood and how these responses shape intergroup relations. We introduce the Special Issue with an overview of emerging social psychological research on collective victimhood. To date, this research has focused mostly on destructive versus positive consequences of collective victimhood for relations with an adversary group, and examined victim groups' needs, victim beliefs, and underlying social identity and categorization processes. We identify several neglected factors in this literature, some of which are addressed by the empirical contributions in the current issue. The Special Issue offers novel perspectives on collective victimhood, presenting findings based on a diverse range of methods with mostly community samples that have direct and vicarious experiences of collective harm in different countries

Emotional Processes in Elaborating a Historical Trauma in the Daily Press

Twentieth century has witnessed several cases of mass traumatization when groups as wholes were ostracized even threated with annihilation. From the perspectives of identity trauma, when harms are afflicted to a group of people by other groups because of their categorical membership, ethnic and national traumas stand out. This paper aims to investigate long-term consequences of permanent traumatization on national identity with presenting a narrative social psychological study as a potential way of empirical exploration of the processes of collective traumatization and trauma elaboration. A Narrative Trauma Elaboration Model has been introduced which identifies linguistic markers of the elaboration process. Newspaper articles (word count = 203172) about a significant national trauma of the Hungarian history, Treaty of Trianon (1920), were chosen from a ninety year time span and emotional expressions of narratives were analysed with a narrative categorical content analytic tool (NarrCat). Longitudinal pattern of data show very weak emotional processing of the traumatic event. Results are discussed in terms of collective victimhood as core element of national identity and its effects on trauma elaboration

Towards a Narrative Understanding of Victimhood : The Perception of Intergroup Conflicts in Light of Past Ingroup Victimization

The present study explores the role of linguistic compositional characteristics in transmitting collective victimhood beliefs. Experimentally manipulated excerpts of history textbooks were used to examine the perception of the victim position of national outgroups and its intermediary social psychological processes with Hungarian (N = 415) and Finnish (N = 116) participants. The results reveal that the narrative composition of the victimhood narrative had a significant effect on the perception of the target groups’ victimhood position. The evaluation of the groups changed according to which variant of the story was introduced. The results demonstrate that the perception of a perpetrator group can be changed purely by means of narrative construction and that their actions can acquire a “victim tone”. This effect is present in both the Hungarian and Finnish samples, suggesting that narrating an event of victimhood has certain universal characteristics, although their effect is partially dependent on the national-historical-cultural contexPeer reviewe