Beyond remembrance: Genocide commemoration as a lens for understanding collective victimhood and contemporary conflicts

Genocide commemorations are a key societal mechanism through which collective victimhood is constructed and transmitted across generations, yet their implications for contemporary conflicts remain underexamined. We conducted parallel naturalistic longitudinal studies in Armenia around Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and Israel around Holocaust Remembrance Day (Time 1), with a lower‐salience comparison 2 months later (Time 2). Across both studies, Armenian and Jewish‐Israeli participants reported heightened existential threat and reduced inclusive victim consciousness around Remembrance Day than at the post‐Remembrance Day assessment. Armenian participants also reported lower willingness to reconcile with Azerbaijan, while their attitudes toward Ukrainian victims of the Russia–Ukraine war did not differ significantly across time. In Israel, attitudes toward the conflict with Palestinians did not differ significantly across time, but participants reported greater willingness to help Ukrainian victims at Time 1. Time 1 indirect effect analyses further revealed competing pathways: greater personal involvement in commemoration was indirectly associated with more conflict‐supportive attitudes (via heightened threat, moral entitlement, and reduced inclusive victimhood) and with more conciliatory and prosocial attitudes (via heightened moral obligation). These findings highlight that genocide commemorations are linked to competing psychological processes, which may explain their divergent implications for intergroup relations, a tension discussed in the paper.