Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of communities in attributions of responsibility for the traumatising experience of war. A major challenge for post-war reconstruction is posed by the assignment of collective guilt to entire ethnic groups. The study presented in this chapter explores the level of traumatisation in two groups that were recently in conflict—the Croats and Serbs—their perception of collective guilt and their present inter-group relationships. On the basis of the existing literature, the authors expected to find a positive link between the level of traumatisation on the one hand and social distance towards the out-group or nationalism on the other hand. The authors then wonder to what extent this relation is mediated by group-oriented processes, such as identification with one’s own ethnic group and group-based emotion of collective guilt assignment. Their findings show that the relationship is not as straightforward as one might have expected. War trauma appears to instigate a complex pattern of inter-group attitudes and emotions; while it is directly related to the negative out-group attitudes, trauma also influences the interpretation about the other group being responsible as a whole for the personal and collective hurt. Although there are somewhat different patterns of strength of selected mediators in Croatian and Serbian samples, findings about the importance of one specific group-based emotion—collective guilt assignment—is fairly firm and well grounded. The results show that this emotional response, either partially or completely, mediates the association between war-related traumatic experiences and (negative) out-group attitudes. Therefore, these results could have important implications for future intergroup relations of the antagonised groups and for the processes of social reconstruction.
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Notes
- 1.
For more detailed comparative census data on the level of education in Croatia see: http://www.dzs.hr/Hrv_Eng/ljetopis/2008/PDF/05-bind.pdf. For Serbian statistics see: http://webrzs.stat.gov.rs/axd/popis.htm. Although our participants were more educated than the general population, our previous analysis showed no differences in this cohort on relevant scores among participants with different levels of education (Penic and Corkalo Biruski 2009).
- 2.
Experiences of combatantship were also included in the cumulative war exposure score. Although one could argue that there are differences between experiencing war trauma as a civilian and as a combatant, there is no doubt that active combatant experience has great traumatic potential (Keane et al. 2004) and that many victims of war, including refugees, either witness or personally experience combat-related events. This is true for many participants in the sample studied in our research, who were between 17 and 23 years old when the war started. Many measures of war-related trauma exposure follow similar logic (Norris and Hamblen 2004).
- 3.
The underlying assumption in adding the number of traumatic experiences is that stressful and traumatic events have a cumulative effect: the more traumatic experiences one has had, the greater is the risk to one’s mental health. The same assumption is at the core of a number of scales that measure the impact of trauma (for example, Wolfe and Kimerling 1997; Norris and Hamblen 2004). Moreover, a study by Ajdukovic et al. (2007) showed that the simple sum of different traumatic categories of events people have experienced was the best predictor of their mental health status many years after the exposure.
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Corkalo Biruski, D., Penic, S. (2014). Traumatised Selves: Does War Trauma Facilitate In-Group Bonding and Out-Group Distancing?. In: Spini, D., Elcheroth, G., Corkalo Biruski, D. (eds) War, Community, and Social Change. Peace Psychology Book Series, vol 17. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7491-3_9
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