Claiming one’s own group as the only victim of the conflict

In most intractable conflicts, both of the parties involved suffer severe physical and psychological trauma. However, people often assess the impact of the conflict subjectively, perceiving their own group to be the only legitimate victim, and their rivals as illegitimate perpetrators of unjust and immoral misdeeds (Bar-Tal et al., 2009; Nadler & Saguy, 2003). This belief is apparent in communities at conflict today and in recent history. For example, both Israelis and Palestinians perceive themselves as the unequivocal victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict and accuse the other group of being the victimizer (Bar-Tal, 2007; Caplan, 1999). The same holds true for Catholics and Protestants in the violent context of Northern Ireland (Cairns, Mallet, Lewis, & Wilson, 2003), or Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia (e.g., Volkan, 1997). Even when the roles of victim and victimizer are fairly obvious, the victimizers can feel that they are, in fact, the ones who are set upon. For instance, Buckley-Zistel (2006) documented that a large percentage of the Hutu population considered themselves to be victims of the horrific Rwandan Genocide committed by Hutu militias against the Tutsi minority in 1994.

According to Noor and colleagues (Noor, Brown, Gonzalez, Manzi, & Lewis, 2008; Noor, Brown & Prentice, 2008), when intergroup relations are based on conflicts over social or material resources, this sense of victimhood may interplay with group members’ need to compete with the out-groups (e.g., Brewer & Brown, 1998). Thus, group members may tend to engage in a real competition with the out-group over who has suffered more. Interestingly, this kind of competition has a psychological benefit. Indeed, it helps people cope with conflict. Years of conflict create stress and uncertainty among group members. The highest victimhood status helps to manage these feelings by providing safe explanations about who is responsible for the violence, and clear boundaries between good and evil (Bar-Tal et al., 2009). Furthermore, perceiving one’s own group as the primary victim of the conflict can reduce feelings of guilt that arise when people witness misdeeds perpetrated by ingroup members (Smyth, 2001). By the same token, it may help to rationalize and legitimize acts of revenge against rivals, especially in a post-conflict era (see Nadler & Saguy, 2003). Finally, portraying one’s own group as the “real” victim of the conflict may also serve material purposes, as it frames the group the worthy recipient of sympathy and assistance. Thus, encouraging the perception of one’s own group as the victim may enhance the possibility of receiving moral and practical support from the international community (Simon & Klandermans, 2001).

For all these reasons, it is no wonder that each of the parties involved in a conflict makes great efforts to persuade themselves, rivals, and third parties that their suffering has been greatest. Recent research has provided empirical support for the detrimental consequences of competitive victimhood in reconciliation processes. For instance, Noor and colleagues found that in Northern Ireland, competitive victimhood decreases the Protestants' and Catholics' inclination to forgive each other (Noor, Brown, Gonzalez, et al. 2008; Noor, Brown, & Prentice, 2008) and, at the same time, reduces the willingness to accept responsibility for each group's past misdeeds. Similarly, in Chile, competitive victimhood has been empirically demonstrated to be a great obstacle to the reconciliation between pro-Pinochet and anti-Pinochet groups (Noor, Brown, Gonzalez, et al. 2008).

Removing competitive victimhood

Social psychologists are now developing strategies to overcome the tendency toward competitive victimhood.

One strategy emphasizes the need to blur the lines between the conflicting groups. The Common In-group Identity Model (CIIM; Dovidio, Gaertner, & Saguy, 2009) suggests that, through a process of cognitive recategorization, members of separate groups may come to see themselves as belonging to subsets of the same group. With this increased sense of “we”, the cognitive and motivational processes leading to perceive one’s own group as the victim and the other group as the perpetrators are redirected to include former out-group members in a single common group, in which psychological and physical sufferings are shared.

Some studies have documented the beneficial effects of this increased sense of communality in contexts characterized by past or present victimization. For instance, Wohl and Branscombe (2005) found that Jews felt more forgiving towards Germans when they were encouraged to think of the two groups together, in terms of the larger group of human beings worldwide. Furthermore, Gaunt (2009) documented that identifying with the common group of “Israelis” weakened the Israeli Arabs’ tendency to dehumanize Israeli Jews. More recently, my colleagues and I (Andrighetto, Mari, Volpato, and Behluli, in press) provided more direct evidence of common in-group identity effects on competitive victimhood. We reported that an increased identification with the “Kosovars” common group decreased the Kosovar Albanians tendency to compete with the Serbs to obtain the status of victim of the past conflict.

However, despite these encouraging findings, the practical achievements of a common identity after protracted conflicts are often slow to appear, and require great efforts on the part of the civil society. First, policymakers should strive to create a unified political structure. In the Kosovar context, for example, the existence of parallel Serbian institutions in most domains of everyday life (security, health care, school) strongly hinders the development of a common in-group entity, and their integration with identical Albanian institutions could be the first step in reducing competitive victimhood. Second, peacemakers should promote interventions, particularly in educational settings, aimed at redefining the boundaries between conflicting groups through the introduction of cooperative and interdependent tasks. Another way to remove this deep sense of victimhood would be by enhancing communication among members of conflicting groups. The effort to claim that one’s own group has suffered more than the other group inhibits any expression of altruism or understanding toward out-group members. Direct, meaningful, and friendly interaction is therefore crucial in enhancing positive emotions toward out-group members and, consequently, reducing competitive victimhood. In the same vein, through direct interaction people may become more aware of their adversaries' suffering, and discover that the others’ experiences of victimization are not so different from their own.

Although there are unquestionable benefits that this type of contact can provide, this strategy cannot be applied universally. In many post-conflict settings, contextual and political features prohibit direct contact between conflicting groups (Crisp, Stathi, Turner, & Husnu, 2008). In Kosovo, for instance, the Albanian and Serbian communities are currently strictly segregated; the Serbs live in isolated enclaves monitored by international forces. As a consequence, interventions involving direct contact can be very difficult to carry out.

To overcome this barrier to reconciliation, social psychologists are now moving beyond direct contact, testing the effectiveness of alternative forms of contact. Whright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, and Ropp (1997) have argued that an 'extended contact', that is the mere knowledge of some in-group members being friends with some out-group members, could also help to heal fractured relations. Supporting this idea, Paolini, Hewstone, Cairns, and Voci (2004) conducted two surveys in Northern Ireland and found that those who knew people in their group who were friends with people in the other community were less prejudiced. In another example, we found that among Kosovar Albanian adolescents, simply the knowledge that their older family members had frequent and good-quality contacts with some out-group members encouraged the Kosovar Albanians to have empathetic and trusting feelings toward their Serbian rivals. In turn, such feelings decreased the participants’ willingness to engage in competitive victimhood with the Serbs. As in the case of common in-group identity, the theoretical insights of these findings gain real-world importance only if they are translated into practical interventions. For instance, peacemakers could plan educational programs allowing new generations to learn about their enemy group’s suffering through some narratives and stories told by their older family members.

Besides extended contact, ‘imagined contact’ (e.g., Crisp, Husnu, Melady, & Stathi, 2010) has been recently proposed as a further solution for healing relations in highly segregated communities. Imagined contact posits on the idea that simply imagining a positive social interaction with an out-group member may be sufficient to improve negative attitudes between groups. To our knowledge, this form of contact has not yet been tested as a means for defeating competitive victimhood. Although it may be a powerful strategy, especially in an educational program, it is possible that high anxiety could obstruct the positive effects of this simulation. Imagining an interaction with an adversary could prove stressful in conflict zones.

From a practical perspective, all these strategies may prove important for the application of practical interventions by policymakers and educators aimed at reducing the tendency to compete over sufferings. Interestingly, some peace programs worldwide are trying to overcome competitive victimhood by putting the principles of intergroup contact into practice, and mainly focusing on direct contact. For instance, “Operazione Colomba” (an Italian NGO) has organized multiethnic encounters in Gorazdevac (a Serbian village in West Kosovo) that allow Serbian and Albanian participants to speak with each other about the conflict and the experiences of victimization they have suffered.

However, both academics and peacemakers must consider that intervention to reduce competitive victimhood or, more generally, to increase positive attitudes toward the rival out-group, may have different effects depending on the status and power of the groups in conflict. For example, Bruneau and Saxe (2012) demonstrated that Israelis, who have more power, both economic and military, and Palestinians, who have less power, respond asymmetrically to listening interventions. In particular, when Israelis were asked to actively listen to a Palestinian, their trust of the Palestinians and their empathy toward Palestinian suffering increased. If Palestinians listened while Israelis spoke, their attitudes did not change. In contrast, Palestinians’ attitudes improved only when they were given the opportunity to speak while an Israeli listened.

The path to a radical removal of the sense of victimhood and, ultimately, to reconciliation is challenging. Nevertheless, a growing body of social psychological research is revealing key strategies for its achievement. Concepts like intergroup contact and common in-group identity seem to be not only useful, but instrumental in establishing new societies no longer characterized by segregation and tension, but instead by harmony and integration. However, it is clear that for these strategies to be effective, there must be effort and coordination on the part of academic researchers, policymakers and peacemakers.

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