Book Description

"This book provides an overview of current social psychological scholarship on collective victimhood. Drawing on different contexts of collective victimization-such as due to genocide, war, ethnic or religious conflict, racism, colonization, Islamophobia, the caste system, and other forms of direct and structural collective violence-this edited volume presents theoretical ideas and empirical findings concerning the psychological experience of being targeted by collective violence in the past or present. Specifically, the book addresses questions such as: How are experiences of collective victimization passed down in groups and understood by those who did not experience the violence personally? How do people cope with and make sense of collective victimization of their group? How do the different perceptions of collective victimization feed into positive versus hostile relations with other groups? How does group-based power shape these processes? Who is included in or excluded from the category of "victims", and what are the psychological consequences of such denial versus acknowledgment? Which individual psychological processes such as needs or personality traits shape people's responses to collective victimization? What are the ethical challenges of researching collective victimization, especially when these experiences are recent and/or politically contested? This edited volume offers different theoretical perspectives on these questions, and shows the importance of examining both individual and structural influences on the psychological experience of collective victimhood-including attention to power structures, history, and other aspects of the social and political context that help explain the diversity in experiences of and responses to collective victimization"--