Abstract
Understanding people’s attitudes toward conciliatory policies in territorial interethnic conflicts is important for a peaceful conflict resolution. We argue that ingroup identification in combination with the largely understudied territorial ownership perceptions can help us explain attitudes toward conciliatory policies. We consider two different aspects of ingroup identification—attachment to one’s ethnic ingroup as well as ingroup superiority. Furthermore, we suggest that perceptions of ingroup and outgroup ownership of the territory can serve as important mechanisms that link the different forms of ingroup identification with conciliatory policies. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among Israeli Jews (N = 1,268), we found that ingroup superiority, but not attachment, was negatively related to conciliatory policies. This relationship was explained by lower outgroup (but not by higher ingroup) ownership perceptions of the territory. Our findings highlight the relevance of studying ingroup superiority as a particularly relevant dimension of identification that represents a barrier to acknowledging outgroup’s territorial ownership, and is thus indirectly related to less support for conciliatory policies in intergroup conflict settings.
Highlights
With around 100 ongoing disputes over territory (Metrocosm, 2015), territorial conflicts between ethnic groups are rather widespread (Toft, 2014)
A model with six distinct latent factors— ingroup attachment, ingroup superiority, ingroup ownership perceptions, outgroup ownership perceptions, support for conciliatory policies, and place attachment—did not fit the data very well [χ2(df) = 765.22 (120), p < 0.001; RMSEA = 0.065 (0.068,0.079); CFI = 0.930; SRMR = 0.040]
In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we examined whether Israeli Jews’ territorial ownership perceptions of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea explain the relation between ingroup identification and support for conciliatory policies
Summary
With around 100 ongoing disputes over territory (Metrocosm, 2015), territorial conflicts between ethnic groups are rather widespread (Toft, 2014). Theory and research point at the importance of considering the different ways in which people identify with their group, for instance in a constructive or a destructive way (Staub, 1997). The latter form of identification relates to prejudices toward outgroups or outgroup aggression (e.g., Golec de Zavala et al, 2009; Wagner et al, 2012; Verkuyten et al, 2021). Ingroup identification as such might not represent a barrier for the endorsement of conciliatory policies in conflict regions, but it might be relevant to consider how people identify with their own group (see Roccas et al, 2008). We build on previous research on the form of identification in relation to intergroup relations by investigating how ingroup superiority and attachment relate to attitudes toward conciliatory policies
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