The Ethics of Researching and Writing About Collective Victimhood in Postconflict Societies

This chapter examines ethical questions involved in researching collective victimhood in postconflict settings, where the violence is very recent or still ongoing. Drawing on her field work experience in Rwanda, Zanzibar, and Sudan, the author discusses challenges such as trauma and politicized victim narratives that can result in participants’ unwillingness to talk, researchers being mistaken for therapists, and risks for researchers and participants in discussing politically sensitive topics. Other challenges include researchers becoming biased toward the silenced, nonhegemonic narrative; the difficulty of collecting information on group membership; and participants’ responses being influenced by the perceived group membership of the researchers. Additionally, findings on collective victimization can be misused for political purposes, and researchers carry additional responsibly to assess and navigate these risks in their research, writing, and dissemination. Researchers studying collective victimization need to focus on their participants’ interests and well-being and ensure that the costs for participants are not too high.

When Two Groups Hurt Each Other

This chapter builds on the needs-based model of reconciliation, which posits victim groups’ primary need for agency and perpetrator groups’ primary need for morality, and examines dual conflicts in which groups are both victims and perpetrators. The authors posit that in such cases, the experience of victimization is more psychologically impactful than the experience of perpetration. They review empirical support for this “primacy of agency” effect, as well as evidence of the effects of interventions that affirm the group’s agency in such contexts. The findings show that agency affirmations increase conciliatory responses toward the other conflict party as well as the willingness to relinquish power and violence for the sake of morality. These effects were found across both higher and lower power groups in the conflicts that were examined.

The Tendency to Feel Victimized in Interpersonal and Intergroup Relationships

This chapter discusses individual differences in the tendency to perceive interpersonal victimhood, and parallels to collective victimhood. Specifically, some people are more likely than others to perceive victimization on the interpersonal level, experience it more intensely, and incorporate these experiences into their identity. The tendency to perceive (interpersonal) victimhood consists of four dimensions: a need for recognition of suffering, perceived moral superiority, lack of empathy for others’ suffering, and rumination over negative feelings and thoughts related to experienced offenses. People who score higher on these dimensions show greater biases in their interpretation, memory, and attributions of interpersonal transgressions: They recall them more, perceive them as more severe, expect more to be harmed by others, and perceive more harm in ambiguous situations. They are also less willing to forgive transgressions. The authors compare this with parallel findings on intergroup relations in the context of collective violence, arguing that similar processes operate.

“We All Suffered!”—The Role of Power in Rhetorical Strategies of Inclusive Victimhood and Its Consequences for Intergroup Relations

This chapter examines the different meaning and outcomes of inclusive victim consciousness, depending on who is claiming similarities with whom, and which power dynamics are involved. Drawing on perspectives in rhetorical psychology, the authors argue that these inclusive victimhood claims have a rhetorical function and are always expressed with an audience in mind. While this does not preclude authentic identification with other victim groups, there can also be a selective, strategic use of inclusive victim beliefs that does not result in empathy. For example, high power groups’ claims of having suffered similarly to other groups may serve to legitimize their conflict position or violence. The chapter reviews examples that illustrate the different effects of inclusive victim consciousness expressed by members of high-power groups in relation to other high-power or low-power groups, and by members of low-power groups in relation to high- or low-power groups.

A Critical Race Reading of Collective Victimhood

This chapter examines the cultural psychological processes that contribute to the delegitimization of Black victimhood in the United States. Drawing on a critical race psychology perspective that focuses on societal processes through which racism is maintained and reproduced, the authors examine the precariousness of claims of Black victimhood in the United States. The same mechanisms that maintain racist structures also delegitimize and deny Black victimhood. These processes include individualism and color-blind ideologies, victim blaming, the misrepresentation and dehumanization of Black victims, the assumption of White innocence and Whites’ moral disengagement from responsibility for racism, and claims of victimhood among Whites, especially in response to perceived threats of gains among minority groups. Thus, collective victimhood becomes precarious for Black Americans in that it is used as a tool of further oppression by others, instead of a source of support from third parties. The “benefits” of collective victimhood are not afforded to all groups.

Introduction to The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood

This chapter introduces the volume and gives a brief overview of its structure and the content of each chapter. The chapter describes the nature of social psychological research on collective victimhood to date, defines the concept, and provides an organizing framework for scholarship on collective victimhood. This framework emphasizes the interplay of structural and individual-level factors that need to be considered, as well as how the social psychology of collective victimhood is studied at the micro-, meso-, and macro level of analysis. In order to avoid a determinist and simplistic view of collective victimhood, it is crucial to consider the different ways in which people actively construe and make sense of collective victimization of their group(s). It is also important to consider the role of power, history, and other structural factors that together shape the diversity of experiences of collective victimization as well as the consequences of collective victimhood.

Striking at the Core

This chapter presents an integrated model of psychological needs among victimized groups, building on self-determination theory. Extending the model of needs-based reconciliation and other work on needs among victim groups, the authors posit that collective victimization frustrates basic needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. They review empirical findings showing that the frustration of these needs on the collective level frustrates related needs on the personal level as well, and in turn have a negative effect on psychological well-being and willingness for reconciliation. The chapter focuses in particular on collective autonomy, which is central to many experiences of collective victimization as well as reconciliation attempts. In order to increase victim group members’ willingness to reconcile, it is important to take into consideration all three needs identified in this model and present apologies and other steps toward reconciliation in a way that satisfies these needs.

Experiencing Acknowledgment Versus Denial of the Ingroup’s Collective Victimization

This chapter examines the psychological dimensions and consequences of acknowledgment versus denial of the in-group’s collective victimization. Denial can entail different forms and be literal, interpretative, or implicatory. Likewise, acknowledgment can entail factual acknowledgment, empathic acknowledgment, or even the perpetrator group’s possession of a negative identity. The authors discuss why and how these different forms of acknowledgment and denial matter, the societal means through which acknowledgment versus denial can occur, whose acknowledgment (e.g., perpetrator group vs. third parties) is most relevant in which context, and which events are most important to acknowledge. The chapter reviews findings demonstrating that acknowledgment can improve psychological well-being and intergroup attitudes, while lack of acknowledgment has the opposite effect. The underlying psychological processes that have been studied so far include identity, processes related to the groups’ relationship (e.g., trust), concerns over justice, and affective processes.

Collective Victimhood Resulting From Structural Violence

This chapter discusses collective victimization resulting from structural violence, and how the effects of inequality can have similar deleterious consequences for peoples’ ability to meet basic needs. Social class and structural violence have been underexamined so far in the literature on collective victimhood. However, considering collective victim beliefs due to structural violence—which are related to, but distinct from relative deprivation—enriches our understanding of relevant experiences and extends the collective victim beliefs that should be assessed. The authors show with empirical examples from Italy and South Africa that collective victim beliefs about structural violence are distinct from collective victim beliefs about direct violence. They also reveal that collective victim beliefs about structural violence may predict different outcomes, such as the preference for different forms of acknowledgment or the need for empowerment and acceptance.

Community Members’ Theorization of Their Collective Victimization

Focusing on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, this chapter examines collective influences on individual theorizing about collective victimization more generally, and Islamophobia specifically. The authors argue that the theorization of collective victimhood is a topic of debate within communities, involving arguments about the breadth and inclusivity of the community and the meaning of culturally shared and identity-relevant narratives. For example, the authors explore how arguments as to how Muslims should make sense of their experience of victimization draw on different interpretations of Qur’anic text. Throughout, the authors discuss the two-way relationship between constructions of victimhood and individual experience, and how different ways of theorizing intergroup relations result in different understandings of the nature of group members’ victimization and how they should respond. The authors’ approach highlights the importance of a contextualized, culturally embedded analysis of how collective victimhood is understood and theorized.