ABSTRACT This essay examines the gendered legacy of the hunger strike in modern American history, first in the trans‐Atlantic suffrage movement and then in the linked pacifist and civil rights movements. Hunger strikes were integral to resisting patriarchal and racist power structures in twentieth‐century America, both within the prison system and in the larger society. However, the origins of the modern hunger strike in the suffrage movement have been largely obscured. Instead, the starving Irish nationalist Bobby Sands or the fasting image of Gandhi dominates our image of the hunger striker. In the mid‐twentieth‐century male pacifists such as Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger gain notoriety for their wartime hunger strikes. However, radical women also protested militarism and white supremacy and carried out dramatic hunger strikes during the cold war. Contemporary political prisoners continue to practice the embodied resistance of these pioneering activists.
Abstract Minority inclusion is important to ensure proper representation in democracies. Yet, even in democracies, minority inclusion in politics has historically been challenged by members of majority groups, largely due to perceived threat. Existing literature recognizes psychological factors—namely, values, threats, and norms—driving support for political inclusion, but knowledge of relevant interventions remains limited. We designed psychological interventions, presented as news articles, and tested which ones increased mainstream Jewish majority group members' support for the Palestinian Arab minority's political inclusion in coalition formation in Israel. We employed this context, where the perceived ties between the minority's identity and the identity of the rival in the ongoing conflict make the threat particularly salient, in two critical timepoints: the run‐up to a decisive election (Study 1, N = 1248) and during an ongoing war (Study 2, N = 1391). We found that during the run‐up to the election, interventions targeting value conflict, tension reduction, and norm perceptions increased support for political inclusion, but none of them had the same effect during the war. These findings illustrate the potential of a real‐world intervention tournament, with implications for the promotion of political inclusion in the field.
Abstract Prosocial collective action has been abundantly theorized across political and social science. Related scholarship tends to focus mostly on attitudes or intentions, and less often on actual behaviors. Moreover, emphasis is placed on individual prosocial acts and their aggregation rather than on conceptions of collective, nonreducible phenomena. In this study, we invoke metatheoretical systems thinking to examine more closely the emergence of political assemblages. Drawing on collective action and cultural psychology literature, we argue that in the aftermath of the Russian invasion, a unique climate (assemblage) of solidarity was created in Poland, one conducive to helping, constitutive of affective, discursive, axiological, ideological, and cultural components. The results of latent SEM provide evidence for excellent fit (robust CFI = .986) of the non‐recursive model (hypothesizing a reciprocal relationship between helping and affect) to the data from a nationwide sample of participants ( N = 1034). The model tested as invariant across three groups of participant‐helpers: (1) housing refugees, (2) volunteers, and (3) those helping indirectly. However, differences were found among these groups suggesting that the motivations for helping and the mechanisms involved were varied. Overall, the research highlights the centrality and reciprocity of affect in collective prosociality, as well as its axiological directionality through humanism, with political orientation serving a complementary mediating role.
Abstract Demands for war reparations often re‐emerge in political discourse, decades after conflicts have ended. This research investigates the psychological underpinnings of public support for claiming World War II reparations, focusing on the roles of national narcissism and ingroup victim beliefs. Across four pre‐registered studies conducted in Poland and Greece (total N = 2780), we show that national narcissism—a defensive belief in national greatness coupled with a desire for external recognition—predicts support for war reparation claims. This relationship is mediated by perceptions of ingroup victim beliefs, particularly exclusive victimhood, which emphasizes the ingroup's unique suffering. Our findings illuminate how identity‐based motivations, especially those rooted in narcissistic group beliefs and selective historical narratives, can shape support for populist foreign policy initiatives long after the original conflict has ended.
ABSTRACT Using the synthetic control method and data from 20 African countries, this study quantifies the peace dividend in Mozambique, a country that experienced over 15 years of civil war. More specifically, we use data from 1977 to 2018 to investigate whether the end of the civil war in Mozambique in 1992 brought significant benefits to the country's economic performance. Despite the robust growth observed post‐1992, it is important to determine how much of this can be attributed to peace. Our findings suggest that the end of the war significantly boosted Mozambique's economy, with average real annual GDP over 1992–2010 being over 60% higher than what it would have been had the war continued. This resulted in an accumulated gain in aggregate GDP of US$100 billion over the period 1992–2010 or an annual average gain of about US$ 5 billion. The positive effects, however, were only evident from 1993, hinting at possible legacy effects of the war. The study's results align with other research on the economic impact of conflicts in Africa and are robust to placebo and other sensitivity robustness tests.