Emotions in Conflict

Inhibitors and Facilitators of Peace Making

Eran Halperin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317913962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social and political psychologists have attempted to reveal the reasons why individuals and societies that acknowledge that peace would improve their personal and collective well-being, and are aware of the required actions needed to promote it, are simply incapable of making this step forward. Some social psychologists have advocated the idea that certain societal beliefs and collective memories about the nature of the opponent, the in-group, the history, and the current state of the conflict distort the perceptions of society members and prevent them from identifying opportunities for peace. But these cognitive barriers capture only part of the picture.

Could identifying the role of discrete emotions in conflicts and conflict resolution potentially provide a wide platform for developing pinpoint conflict resolution interventions?

Using a vast array of primary sources, critical literature analysis, and firsthand personal experiences in various conflict zones (Middle East, Cyprus, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland), Eran Halperin introduces a new perspective on psychological barriers to peace. Halperin focuses on various emotional mechanisms that hamper peace processes, even when parties face real opportunities for conflict resolution. More specifically, he explores how hatred, anger, fear, angst, hope, despair, empathy, guilt, and shame, combined with various emotion regulation strategies, provide emotions-based explanations for people's attitudinal and behavioral reactions to peace-related events during the ongoing process of conflict resolution.

Written in a clear and accessible style, Emotions in Conflict offers a thought-provoking and pioneering insight into the role discrete intergroup emotions play in impeding, as well as facilitating, peace processes in intractable conflicts. This book is essential reading for those who study intractable conflicts and their resolutions, and those who are interested in the 'real-world' implication of recent theories and findings on emotion and emotion regulation.

1
Introduction

Intractable conflicts are one of the most difficult problems of contemporary human society. They involve mass violence and fundamentally harm the well-being of the involved citizens as well as hindering the potential development of the involved societies in their entirety. Even beyond the immediate costs of sacrificing human lives, in these conflicts individuals feel obligated to sacrifice their personal interests for the sake of the conflict, and societies pay a high price in terms of economy, education, and other social aspects to survive the conflict. Although it is important to remember that conflicts are sometimes necessary to bring about social change, especially when discrimination and injustice are present, most people probably would prefer to rectify these social and moral wrongdoings in peaceful rather than in violent ways. In other words, all other factors held constant, we can assume that most people would prefer living in peace and security over the destructive alternative of being actively involved in long-term, violent conflict. And indeed, research has shown that even societies that have been involved in violent conflicts for decades highly value the concept of peace (albeit in an abstract way) and at least declare that they would do “everything that is needed” to promote it (e.g., Bar-Tal, 2013).

But recent data shows that out of the 352 violent conflicts that have erupted since World War II, only 144 have concluded in peace agreements (Harbom, Hogbladh, & Wallensteen, 2006). This means that the involved societies in most conflict situations worldwide have failed to mobilize their citizens for peace to make the abovementioned transition. For an outsider, this must be seen as very strange. If most people really prefer peace over war and violence, we would expect societies in conflict to spend most of their time, resources, and energy on attempts to promote peace rather than on maintaining or improving their status vis-à-vis their adversary. But we know that this is not necessarily the situation, and therefore, any objective observer probably would search for that dramatic engine that overrides the wish for peace and maintains long-term conflicts even when the price they extract is so terrible. In a way, this is the million-dollar question put forward by conflict resolution scholars and practitioners—why can’t societies that are involved in long-term conflicts find a balanced and fair solution that will dramatically improve the well-being of their citizens and enable rapid development of various socioeconomic and political objectives?

For many years conflict resolution scholars and practitioners believed that the answer to this question was rather simple. We tend to think that intractable conflicts are over real disagreements, and as such, fundamental ideologies and conflicting goals and interests are the driving forces behind these conflicts. According to that approach, intractable conflicts are so hard to resolve because the real or tangible disagreements at the root of these conflicts cannot be bridged. These disagreements are usually driven and fueled by conflicting ideologies that, at the beginning, help to define the fundamental interests of each side and then also guide the kind of (often aggressive) behavior that is meant to serve these goals and interests. Bar-Tal (2013) has defined this “ideology of conflict” as an ethos, and Ginges, Atran, Medin, and Shikaki (2007) have taken it one step forward by suggesting that, in the context of long-term conflicts, people tend to believe that certain issues or values are sacred, namely, that they cannot be compromised in any situation or for any exchange.

And to some extent this is true. Let us take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a prototypical example of an intractable conflict that has lasted for more than two generations. This conflict is by all means based on real disagreements over real issues, such as the questions of the territory, settlements, the future of Jerusalem, and the future of the Palestinian refugees. The conflict over these real disagreements is driven by conflicting ideologies held by two national movements—the Jewish Zionist and the Palestinian national movements. Accordingly, those who strongly adhere to the Zionist or Palestinian ethos of the conflict see the abovementioned issues as sacred and will probably immediately reject any offer for a peace agreement that inherently includes compromise on what they perceive as sacred values.

But, surprisingly, when one looks more deeply into the current state of affairs within that conflict (and many other long-term conflicts), it is quite clear that although core disagreements and conflicting ideologies still exist, they do not constitute the main obstacles for peace. Public opinion polls from the last decade show vast support among both Israelis and Palestinians for compromises based on previous US-mediated negotiations and peace proposals (e.g., “the Clinton parameters”). For example, in recent poll we have conducted, 65 percent of Palestinians and a similar proportion of Israelis expressed support for peace based on such well-known compromises. These numbers are consistent with the ones revealed in many other polls conducted in the region in the last two decades. As in many other conflicts, such support is conditioned by the premise that an agreement based on these compromises will bring about an end to the historical conflict and a minimization of violence. In other words, at least in the case of that prolonged conflict (and many others), both parties are aware of the costs of ending the conflict, and the large majority among both populations is willing to pay the required price to achieve peace. Accordingly, even if disagreements over real issues still exist, they can no longer be attributed as the core reason for the continuation and at times even for the escalation of the conflict.

Again taking the perspective of a naïve, objective observer, the immediate question raised is why these people can’t make this move or walk this dramatic extra mile, which immediately would improve their lives? If these people and their leaders are aware of the kind of concessions that can bring about peace, and if they are actually willing to make these required concessions to promote peace, why do they keep on fighting and killing each other for such long time?

According to the approach to be promoted in the current book, the answer to that crucial question is rooted in the boundary conditions that were described previously. People in many conflicts, even in the most violent and destructive ones, are willing to make ideological concessions over the real issues, but they lack the faith that such concessions would actually lead to the end of the conflict and the minimization of the violence. They do not have such faith because they do not trust their adversary, because they do not believe the adversary can change its immoral and aggressive behavior, because they are afraid that such concessions will put them in a position of high risk and threat, and also because they do not want their concessions to be perceived as an ultimate confession of responsibility for all past (immoral) events of the conflict.

These processes, which I see as the ultimate barriers to peace making and conflict resolution, are best described as emotional phenomena or emotional processes (Frijda, 1986). I see them as emotional phenomena because they encapsulate the core beliefs and appraisals of societies in conflict together with the core political motivations that are implied by these appraisals. When these appraisals and motivations are accompanied by strong affective experiences, which are typical to violent conflicts, they create extremely negative emotions that have a destructive influence on the probability to promote peace.

In more detail, according to Appraisal Theories of Emotions (e.g., Lazarus, 1982; Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1984) each belief mentioned above reflects a core appraisal theme of a dominant negative emotion. For example, when people believe that the outgroup poses a fundamental threat to their existence and that a peace agreement will not enable them to defend their group vis-à-vis that threat, they actually feel fear (Bar-Tal, 2001; Jarymowicz & Bar-Tal, 2006; Halperin, Bar-Tal, Nets-Zehngut, & Drori, 2008). Hatred toward the outgroup is associated with the belief that the outgroup is evil by nature and will never change its immoral or violent behavior (Halperin, 2008; Sternberg, 2003). Anger, on the other hand, is driven by an appraisal of the outgroup’s actions as unfair and unjust (Lerner & Keltner, 2001; Mackie & Smith, 2000).

But even more importantly, each of these emotions leads to a concrete motivation that constitutes a building block of the general narrative that structures the opposition to peace. To use the same examples described in the appraisals part, when people feel fear they are motivated to avoid political (and other) risks, making them averse to new ideas or initiatives for peace, which inherently include some flavor of risk. For those who are dominated by hatred, there is no real good reason to support negotiations, gestures, or compromises because they do not really believe that such political moves can bring about a meaningful change in the outgroup’s destructive behavior or its intentions. Finally, anger sometimes can motivate people to respond aggressively even to seemingly constructive cues coming from the outgroup.

Having said that, we must not forget that many times, negative emotions constitute an accurate and correctly adjusted reaction to the outgroup’s immoral actions, provocative statements, and aggressive tendencies. In these cases negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and in extreme cases even hatred, are functional because they prepare group members to cope with difficult, conflict-related events. For example, fear is known as a highly functional emotion that helps individuals and groups to take the necessary measures to defend themselves in the face of external threat. Societies dominated by a high sense of security, also termed optimistic overconfidence (Neale & Bazerman, 1991; Kahneman & Tversky, 1996), like the American society prior to the 9/11 terror attack or the Israeli society prior to the Yom Kippur war, may underestimate potential threats and be caught unprepared. So emotions can be functional sometimes …

On the other hand, oftentimes, emotions are not functional and are even counterproductive. As such, they have the potential of playing a central role as psychological barriers to conflict resolution. Outside the context of intractable conflicts, several decades of research point to discrete negative emotions as having a destructive influence in interpersonal conflict resolution and negotiation (for a review see Van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2010). In the recent two decades, side by side with the study of other psychological barriers to conflict resolution (e.g., Bar-Tal & Halperin, 2011; Maoz, Ward, Katz, & Ross, 2002; Mnookin & Ross 1995; Ross & Ward, 1995), scholars have begun to investigate the impact of emotions on public opinion and public behavior in intractable conflicts. Their findings suggest that emotions play a causal role by forming attitudes, biasing attention and action, and shaping reactions to conflict-related events. Some of these studies even show that the effects of emotions on aggressive and conciliatory political attitudes are evident above and beyond other prominent factors, such as ideology and socioeconomic conditions (e.g., Halperin, Russell, Dweck, & Gross, 2011; Spanovic, Lickel, Denson, & Petrovic, 2010).

But what exactly are the destructive effects of negative emotions on conflict resolution and peace making? Research suggests that negative emotions lead to the rejection of positive information about the opponent (Cohen-Chen, Halperin, Porat, & Bar-Tal, 2014) and lead individuals to oppose renewal of negotiations, compromise, and reconciliation (e.g., Halperin, 2011b; Sabucedo, Durán, Alzate, & Rodríguez, 2011). Other studies have suggested that emotions like fear and collective angst may result in higher sensitivity to outgroup threats, more right-wing inclinations (Hirschberger & Pyszczynski, 2010), as well as strengthening ingroup ties (Wohl, Branscombe, & Reysen, 2010) and promoting risk-aversive political tendencies (Sabucedo et al., 2011). Research also has shown that negative emotions, mainly anger and hatred, increase support for extreme aggression and military actions aimed at harming or even at eliminating the opponent (Halperin, 2008, 2011b). Furthermore, although recent studies show that anger can sometimes promote conflict resolution (e.g., Halperin, 2011b; Halperin, Russell, Dweck, & Gross, 2011; Reifen Tagar, Frederico, & Halperin, 2011), in most cases anger leads to the appraisal of future military attacks as less risky and more likely to have positive consequences (Lerner & Keltner, 2001).

Even more recently, scholars have begun to examine the role positive emotions play in conflicts. Hope, for example, has been found to play a constructive role in reducing hostility, increasing problem solving in negotiations, and promoting support for conciliatory policies (Carnevale & Isen, 1986; Cohen-Chen, Crisp, & Halperin, 2015a; Cohen-Chen, Halperin, Crisp, & Gross, 2014). Furthermore, several studies conducted in the post-conflict settings of Northern Ireland (Moeschberger, Dixon, Niens, & Cairns, 2005) and Bosnia (Čehajić, Brown, & Castano, 2008) reveal a positive relationship between empathy and willingness to forgive opponents for past wrongdoings.

Why Have We Only Recently Started Studying Emotions in Conflicts?

But if emotions are such powerful engines of human behavior and of conflict behavior more specifically, why have we only recently started studying emotions in the context of intractable conflicts? Interestingly enough, although the central role played by emotions in conflict has long been recognized by many of the scholars who study ethnic conflicts and conflict resolution (e.g., Bar-Tal, Halperin, & De Rivera, 2007; Horowitz, 1985; Lindner, 2006a; Petersen, 2002; Staub, 2005; Volkan, 1997), empirical investigations into the nature, role, and implications of emotions in long-term conflicts were quite rare until the last two decades. How can this dissonance between consensual acknowledgment and scarcity of empirical research be explained?

I would argue that the answer to this question is rooted in the fundamental nature of human beings, in the nature and development of some academic disciplines, and in the problematic relationships (or lack of them) between different disciplines. Starting with the nature of human beings, it would be fair to assume that most people (lay citizens, leaders, and scholars alike) do not want to believe that emotions are driving them to hurt themselves and others. Just think of a leader who sends people to war knowing that many of them will not return to their families and loved ones. Such a leader must be totally convinced that she had no other alternative but making that difficult decision, that the decision was driven by ideological and maybe even existential considerations, and that the decision-making process was clean, normative, and unbiased. These parameters can help the leader to optimally rationalize and justify the dramatic decision of going to war. Yet the fundamental idea that emotions play some role in driving such decisions challenges all these parameters. Accordingly, people prefer to avoid the emotional aspects while focusing on the more rational or ideological considerations because it helps them preserve their positive self-image even when engaging in one of the most difficult actions—violent conflict.

That idea speaks nicely to the concept of naïve realism (Ross & Ward, 1996). This bias denotes a human tendency to believe that: (a) the individual sees events in objective reality and holds social attitudes, beliefs, preferences, and priorities that stem from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased, and essentially ‘unmediated’ apprehension of the information or evidence at hand; (b) other rational social perceivers will generally share her reactions, behaviors, and opinions—provided that they have had access to the same information and that they too have processed that information in a reasonably thoughtful and open-minded fashion; and (c) the failure of a given individual or group in question to share her views arises not from rationally held information and beliefs but rather from other reasons (Ross & Ward, 1996). Although in their empirical work, Lee Ross, Emily Pronin, and others focused mainly on people’s tendency to believe that cognitive biases do not distort their own decision-making processes (e.g., Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002), I think that the same principle can be applied to emotions as well. Accordingly, if most people believe that emotional processes do not intervene in the way they think and act regarding conflicts, it makes sense to focus on other factors when trying to study conflict resolution processes.

The second reason why emotions have only recently been incorporated into the study of intergroup conflicts and their resolution is that developments in the field of conflict resolution have slowly followed the more rapid developments in psychology that have experienced a spectacular growth in the study of emotion (Lewis, Haviland-Jones, & Barrett, 2008). As parts of that so-called emotional revolution, emotional theories have been expanded, a wider set of emotions has been studied, and more accurate and validated measurements have been created (Mauss & Robinson, 2009). In addition to all other obvious advantages of that revolution, it also made the study of emotions more accessible to other disciplines, and today emotions are becoming more and more common in research disciplines like political science (e.g., Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000), sociology (Scheff, 2003), law (Maroney & Gross, 2014), and philosophy (Griffiths, 2013). But the interdisciplinary boundaries still have remained difficult to cross, and one pivotal challenge on the way toward achieving this goal is to knit together several communities of scholars. I’ll elaborate on this point further in the last chapter of the book.

Finally, another reason why conflict resolution scholars feel reluctant to study the effects of feelings and emotions on the dynamics of political conflicts is because most of them express a rather deterministic view regarding the existence and implications of intense or negative emotions in long-term conflicts. According to this view, intense or negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and contempt, are an inherent part of political conflicts. As such, studying them can promote the understanding of political conflicts, but it can do little to promote their resolution. Given that the conflict resolution field is oriented toward an applied approach aiming at promoting the resolution rather than just the understanding of conflicts, studying emotions can be seen oftentimes as a waste of time.

Some Basic Assumptions of This Book

Together with the increasing acknowledgment of the centrality of emotional processes in conflicts and their resolution, various approaches to the study of emotions generally and, more specifically, to the study of emotions in conflicts have emerged. The scope of this book is too limited to present a comprehensive overview and a critical examination of all those different approaches, so in the following paragraphs, I will briefly try to introduce the main assumptions that constitute the building blocks of the way I have been studying emotions in conflicts in recent years.

First Assumption: Emotions do not operate in a vacuum, and hence, studying emotional processes in intractable conflicts should be different than studying emotions in other domains in life.

Kurt Lewin (1951) has suggested that human behavior is a function of an environment in which a person operates and that any behavioral analysis must begin with the description of the situation as a whole. This is due to the fact that people’s conception of the context to a large extent determines their behavioral options and eventually their chosen routes of action. In line with this classic notion, I argue that emotions in general, and collective emotions more specifically, do not operate in a vacuum. As such, their generation, nature, and implications are influenced by the specific context in which they appear. This notion is in line with Barrett’s and Mesquita’s work suggesting that a more satisfactory definition of emotion should incorporate the basic fact that emotions are contextually constituted (Barrett, 2006; Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007; Mesquita, 2003; Mesquita et al., 2006; Mesquita & Leu, 2007). Rather than defining emotions as features of the mind or—in Klaus Scherer’s terms—“synchronized changes in the states of … organismic subsystems” (p. 697), these authors suggest that emotions should be placed at the interface between mind and context.

The collective context’s significance lies in the fact that it dictates society members’ needs and goals as well as the challenges they encounter to satisfy them. Therefore, as Halperin and Pliskin (2015) have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Emotion-Based Approach to Conflict Resolution—Some Basic Concepts
• 3 Intergroup Hatred in Intractable Conflicts—The Ultimate Barrier to Peace
• 4 Intergroup Anger in Intractable Conflicts—Not Exactly What You Had in Mind …
• 5 Societies Under Threat—Collective Fear and Angst As Barriers and (at Times) Catalysts of Peace
• 6 Is Peace Really an Option? Hope, Despair, and the Peace Process
• 7 Moral Emotions in Intractable Conflicts: Group-Based Guilt, Conflict Resolution, and Reconciliation
• 8 Empathy As a Peace Catalyst in Intractable Conflict: Is It Feasible? Is It Enough?
• 9 The Catch-22 of Intractable Conflicts: The Role of Pride and Humiliation in Conflicts and Peace Processes
• 10 Changing Feelings to Promote Peace: Emotion Regulation as a New Path to Conflict Resolution
• References
• Index