Psychocultural Interpretation Theory and Peacemaking in Ethnic Conflicts

Psychocultural interpretation theory explains the intensity and intransigence of ethnic conflicts and in so doing challenges earlier antipsychological views of social and political conflict. It provides a socially rooted psychoanalytic theory and language giving a central role to culturally rooted social and psychological processes which produce dispositions-shared images, perceptions of the external world, and motives for individual and group behavior. In intransigent ethnic conflicts, those core dispositions which invoke security fears and deep-seated threats to identity, are used by groups and individuals to interpret the motives of opponents in ways which often prevent groups from addressing the competing substantive interests which divide them. Conflict management proposals which follow from psychocultural interpretation theory focus on either altering disputants' deep-seated mutual fears surrounding issues of identity and security in intense conflicts or in lowering their salience. To do this, parties must come to recognize the connection between past losses and present fears, and to engage in collective grieving, mourning, and reconciliation. Psychocultural interpretation theory does not deny the relevance of either power inequalities or interest-based proposals for peacemaking but sees criticalfirst steps in conflict management as changing the mutual hostile interpretations antagonists hold.