Peace Promotion, Psychology of
itself in the mass-movement ‘No More War,’ organiza-
tional pacifism lived on in the call for the ‘League of
Nations’ that found outstanding support in Britain.
The new peace organizations in France and England
differed from the German peace movement in their
judgment of the imminent threat to world peace posed
by right-wing dictatorships. In France, the ‘Ligue
internationale des Combattants de la Paix’ emerged as
the mouthpiece of integral pacifism in the 1930s. It
played down the threat of war emanating from Nazi
Germany, attacked French defense policy, and de-
manded strict neutrality towards current military
conflicts, a position that could well have led to
collaboration during German occupation (Ingram
1991). This attitude corresponded to the British ‘Peace
Pledge Union,’ which began to loose ground only after
the obvious failure of the British appeasement policy
(Ceadel 1980). With the beginning of national socialist
rule, the German peace movement was forced into
exile or exposed to persecution (see Holl 1988a).
7. After World War II
The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as
well as the postwar strategy of nuclear deterrence
developed in the course of the East-West confron-
tation gave new dimensions to the discussion on war
and peace. Originating from the USA and directed
against the Vietnam war, a radical peace movement
staging a new type of mass protest and with the
characteristics of the ‘New Social Movements’ came
into being (see Breyman 1998). In accordance with
nuclear pacifism, this peace movement argued that
nuclear war of aggression, nuclear preventive warfare,
and nuclear defensive warfare were virtually indis-
tinguishable from one another. Additionally, it expres-
sed doubt with regard to the peacekeeping effect of the
nuclear deterrence strategy and played up the fear of
the nuclear self-destruction of humanity. These argu-
ments motivated the movement’s opposition to all
weapons of mass destruction. In a large number of
Western countries in the 1980s, the new peace move-
ment achieved a mass mobilization against the in-
stallation of medium-range NATO missiles in Western
Europe that in the end proved futile.
See also: Social Movements and Gender
Bibliography
Bortolotti F D 1985 La Donna, La Pace, l’Europa. L’Associ-
azione internazionale delle donne dalle origini alla prima
guerra mondiale. Franco Angeli Libri, Milan, Italy
Breyman S 1998 Mo
ement Genesis. Social Mo
ement Theory
and the 1980s West German Peace Mo
ement. Westview Press,
Boulder, CO
Brock P 1968 Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era
to the First World War. Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ
Brock P 1983 The Mahatma and Mother India: Essays on Gandhi’s
Non-
iolence and Nationalism. Navajivan Publishing House,
Ahmedabad, India
Brock P 1990 The Quaker Peace Testimony 1660 to 1914.
Sessions Book Trust, York, UK
Brock P 1991a Freedom from Violence: Sectarian Pacifism from
the Middle Ages to the Great War. University of Toronto
Press, Toronto, Canada
Brock P 1991b Freedom from War: Nonsectarian Pacifism
1814–1914. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada
Brock P, Socknat T P (eds.) 1999 Challenge to Mars: Essays on
Pacifism from 1918 to 1945. University of Toronto Press,
Toronto, Canada
Ceadel M 1980 Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a
Faith. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK
Ceadel M 1987 Thinking about Peace and War. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, UK
Ceadel M 1996 The Origins of War Pre
ention. The British Peace
Mo
ement and International Relations, 1730–1854. Clarendon
Press, Oxford, UK
Chickering R 1975 Imperial Germany and a World Without War.
The Peace Mo
ement and German Society, 1892–1914. Prince-
ton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Cooper A H 1996 Paradoxes of Peace. German Peace Mo
ements
Since 1945. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI
Cooper S E 1991 Patriotic Pacifism. Waging War on War in
Europe 1815–1914. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
DeBenedetti C, Chatfield C 1990 An American Ordeal. The
Antiwar Mo
ement of the Vietnam War 1st edn. Syracuse
University Press, Syracuse, NY
Fried A H 1972 Handbuch der Friedensbewegung, Vols. I and II.
Garland Publishing, New York
Grossi V 1994 Le Pacifisme EuropeT en 1889–1914. Bruylant,
Bruxelles, Belgium
Holl K 1988a German pacifists in exile. In: Chatfield C, van den
Dungen P (eds.) Peace Mo
ements and Political Cultures.
University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN, pp. 165–83
Holl K 1988b Pazifismus in Deutschland. Suhrkamp Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Ingram N 1991 The Politics of Dissent. Pacifism in France
1919–1939. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK
Liddington J The Road to Greenham Common. Feminism and
Anti Militarism in Britain Since 1820. Syracuse University
Press, Syracuse, NY
Schott L K 1997 Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Before
World War II. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
Vaisse M (ed.) 1993 Le Pacifisme en Europe des anneT es 1920 aux
anneT es 1950. Bruylant, Bruxelles, Belgium
van der Linden W H 1987 The International Peace Mo
ement
1815–1874. Tilleul Publications, Amsterdam
Wittner L S 1993 One World or None. A History of the Nuclear
Disarmament Mo
ement Through 1953. Stanford University
Press, Stanford, CA
K. Holl
Peace Promotion, Psychology of
Brutal conflicts such as those in Rwanda, Kosova, and
East Timor have boosted awareness of the subjective
dimensions of war, genocide, and intergroup conflict
11151
Peace Promotion, Psychology of
and of the need to address hatreds, fears, and
emotional wounds of war in building peace. Within a
multidisciplinary perspective, this article examines the
psychological origins of war and destructive inter-
group conflict and psychological approaches to re-
solving conflict nonviolently and to building peace
with social justice.
1. Historical Context
Psychology became prominent partly through helping
the US develop government tests for selecting
military recruits in World War I. Through World War
II, many psychologists contributed to war efforts,
although William James, Edward Tolman, and others
worked for peace.
Following World War II, social psychologists such
as Morton Deutsch, Herbert Kelman, Otto Klineberg,
Gardner Murphy, Charles Osgood, Muzafer Sherif,
and Ralph White analyzed sources of intergroup
tension and methods of nonviolent conflict resolution,
with an emphasis chiefly on the Cold War. The nuclear
threat animated large numbers of psychologists world-
wide, as researchers such as Robert Jay Lifton, John
Mack, and Milton Schwebel examined the psychic
impact of living under the threat of nuclear annihil-
ation. Throughout the Cold War, psychological re-
search focused mostly on negative peace, that is, on
stopping and preventing war (White 1986), rather than
on positive peace, which involves social justice, posi-
tive inter-group relations, human rights, and sustain-
able development.
Following the Cold War, psychologists examined a
wider array of peace issues such as women and war,
militarism, children and armed conflict, environmental
destruction, and postconflict healing.
2. Psychological Sources of War and Destructi
e
Intergroup Conflict
Armed conflicts, including the intrasocietal conflicts
that are now the dominant form of war, have complex
political, historical, and economic roots. Much de-
structive conflict originates in a divergence of objective
interests, competition over scarce resources such as
land and water, and worsening life conditions. The
1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, had ante-
cedents in land scarcity, social class, and the political
and economic privileging of Tutsis under the Belgian
colonial regime (Prunier 1995). Many conflicts have
their origins in struggles over oil, diamonds, land, and
other objective resources.
Armed conflict also has subjective sources such as
social identity and ideology. Even when no objective
divergence of interest exists, people tend to categorize
themselves as belonging to different groups and to
11152
show in-group favoritism in judging people, thereby
attaining self-esteem and positive self-identity from
identification with the in-group (Tajfel 1982). Typi-
cally, they judge others relative to the standards set by
the in-group, leading to ethnocentric attitudes and
behavior, and they derogate members of the out-
group. Identity processes alone do not cause violence,
but they set the stage for other subjective processes
such as hostile ideologies to generate hatred and
fighting. Before the Rwandan genocide, President
Habyarimana, a Hutu, used mass media to create an
ideology of hatred toward Tutsis. Similarly, Hitler
used an ideology of racial superiority and global
Jewish conspiracy to fuel anti-Semitism and enable the
Holocaust (Staub 1989).
Social identity processes play a key role in inter-
ethnic conflicts, often referred to as identity conflicts.
Ethnic groups are ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson
1991) that share distinctive language, religion, social
institutions, and origin myths. Ethnic identities ex-
ercise powerful emotional influence, as children are
taught to love their people, their mother tongue, and
their way of life. People learn to define themselves by
reference to the larger group (e.g., ‘I am Russian’), to
experience unity with the group, to be patriotic,
and to make sacrifices for the group. The sense of unity
and solidarity, integrated with a powerful sense of
homeland and a sense that the group requires pro-
tection, may fuel nationalism and separatist desire for
an independent national state.
Conflict escalation often stems from the interplay of
objective and subjective factors. As conflict over
resources escalates, negative psychological dynamics
come into play, and these become self-perpetuating
parts of the conflict process (Rubin et al. 1994). Each
group tends to create enemy images—demonizing,
exaggerated stereotypes of the ‘other’ that amplify fear
and motivate aggressive action (White 1984). These
images bias perceptions, leading adversaries to make
negative attributions or inferences about motivations
regarding the ‘other’s’ behavior. For example, build-
ing military forces could be motivated by desire for
security, but an adversary who harbors enemy images
tends to perceive such actions as having hostile,
offensive intent. Negative perceptions and fears on
both sides fuel behaviors that the ‘other’ regards as
threatening, contributing to malignant conflict spirals
that tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. By using
public media to propagate enemy images, leaders
mobilize society for war and genocide.
In a destructive conflict, damage to the parties’
relationship becomes part of the conflict, and the
emotional and social wounds encourage fighting.
Viewing the other side’s actions as transgressions, each
party sees itself as a victim, constructs collective beliefs
or myths about the traumas inflicted on it, and believes
that violence is necessary for self-preservation (Volkan
1997). Further, the parties tend to become highly
polarized, and intragroup pressures discourage con-

tact with the other side, which is viewed as having
incompatible goals. In protracted conflicts, each side
may come to view itself as irreparably opposed to the
other side, leading to an ethos of antagonism and a
tendency of each group to define itself in part via
opposition to the other.
Subjective influences are visible also in the biased
decision-making of policy elites. Many leaders’ aver-
sion to losses encourages excessive risk-taking and
departure from rational decision making. In intense
conflicts, leaders may experience powerful fears, which
motivate misperceptions regarding their adversaries’
motives, strength, and willingness to fight. As in-
tercommunal tensions escalate, leaders may ex-
perience a cognitive constriction evidenced in reduced
complexity of views of the adversary expressed in
speeches. Leaders may also use inappropriate histori-
cal analogies to guide thinking about current crises.
Under pressure of crises, small leadership groups
having a strong esprit de corps and a charismatic leader
may make flawed decisions guided by premature
consensus, a sense of invulnerability, failure to weigh
moral concerns, internal suppression of dissent, and
poor contingency planning (Janis 1982). In a variety of
contexts, obedience to authority is a powerful enabler
of armed conflict, human rights abuses, and even
genocide (Kelman and Hamilton 1989).
3. Non
iolent Conflict Resolution
Conflict can be constructive when it is managed in
ways that promote communication, healthy relation-
ships, and a sense of positive interdependence
(Deutsch and Coleman 2000). To handle destructive
conflict nonviolently, psychologists have developed or
refined numerous tools designed to resolve conflict
and to transform or repair damaged relationships
(Rubin et al. 1994).
Negotiation, the handling of conflict through com-
munication and bargaining by the parties themselves,
has important psychological dimensions. If, as often
occurs in official diplomacy between hardened ad-
versaries, opponents view negotiation as a win–lose
affair, they may dig into entrenched positions and use
damaging, coercive tactics such as threats. Psycho-
logically, a more useful alternative is principled nego-
tiation, which reframes negotiation as a win–win
affair. In this approach, parties collaborate to solve
their problems and seek not to beat the opponent but
to enable all parties to meet their underlying needs,
thereby contributing to improved communication,
empathy, and relationship. Which approaches to
negotiation are likely to succeed depends not only on
the situation, the kind of issues at stake, and the
amount of fear and relational damage, but also on
culture. For example, US negotiators favor direct
communication and emphasize what is said, while
Asian negotiators often communicate indirectly, re-
Peace Promotion, Psychology of
lying on context and maintaining group harmony by
avoiding direct confrontation.
Strong mistrust, fear of appearing weak, and poor
communication can make negotiation infeasible. In
this situation, a preferred approach is mediation, in
which a third party helps the parties to negotiate a
settlement. By proposing alternatives that the parties
may not be willing to suggest themselves, mediators
enable face-saving. They may also use social influence
processes such as ‘carrots and sticks,’ a mixture of
promised rewards for conflict reducing steps and
promised punishments for intransigent behavior.
Skilled mediators manage the conflict process, separ-
ating the parties when they are likely to say or do
damaging things.
Official diplomacy, however, is limited since hard-
ened adversaries may be unwilling to meet publicly.
Also, public agreements can evoke backlashes, and
official treaties may not change the polarization, fear,
and hostility present in divided societies and com-
munities. Kelman has pioneered the use of interactive
problem-solving workshops (Fisher 1997) as a tool of
unofficial diplomacy and relational improvement.
Regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a typical
workshop brings together three to six Israelis with an
equal number of Palestinians for three days of private
dialogue facilitated by social scientists. In analytic,
problem-solving discussion, the participants examine
the main issues at stake in the conflict, explore their
concerns and fears, and identify possible steps and
solutions that could reduce the political and psycho-
logical barriers on both sides. Empathy, problem
solving, and group exploration of ‘what-if?’ questions
are encouraged. Afterwards, participants take their
new learning about the other side back into their
communities, beginning the wider process of com-
munity transformation. By building positive relation-
ships and infusing useful ideas into conflict-torn
communities, this method provides a useful comp-
lement to official negotiation.
Positive contact between members of polarized,
isolated groups can also reduce destructive conflict
(Pettigrew 1998). Positive contact is likely to occur in
a context of equal status that enables individuals to get
to know each other personally and when steps have
been taken to gain leaders’ support and prevent
damaging behavior. To reduce perceptions that the
positive individuals from the out-group are exceptions,
one may use cognitive strategies that enable generaliz-
ation. One useful strategy is to build superordinate
group identities, as occurred in postapartheid South
Africa when blacks and whites forged larger identities
as ‘South Africans’ and championed the national
rugby team.
The most powerful form of cross-group contact
involves cooperation toward the accomplishment of
shared goals that neither group could achieve on its
own. Global problems such as nuclear proliferation,
environmental destruction, and the HIV\AIDS pan-
11153
Peace Promotion, Psychology of
demic provide many possibilities for cooperation on
shared goals that mitigates and prevents destructive
conflict.
4. Building Peace with Social Justice
Beyond war prevention and nonviolent conflict res-
olution, peace requires social justice, social equity, and
sustainable patterns of living. Psychology has analyzed
how beliefs, attitudes, and practices support social
injustice and ‘-isms’ such as sexism.
In systems of severe oppression and genocide, there
is a pattern of moral exclusion in which out-groups are
dehumanized and removed from the moral realm,
providing a rationalization for killing them. Similarly,
sexism is supported by socialization norms and prac-
tices that privilege boys, encourage girls to conform to
stereotypic roles, and encourage acceptance of existing
patterns of patriarchy. Environmental damage
through, for example, the production of mass amounts
of toxic waste, often leads to environmental racism via
‘not in my back yard’ attitudes that encourage storage
or dumping of toxic materials near impoverished
neighborhoods inhabited by minority groups that lack
political power. Efforts toward poverty alleviation
may be thwarted by tendencies to blame the victim,
enshrined in societal beliefs that people are poor
because they are lazy or deserve it.
In promoting social justice, useful psychological
tools include steps to increase the sense of positive
interdependence between groups, media campaigns
that heighten salience of justice issues and indicate
specific behaviors that can help address the problem,
positive modeling of tolerance and restraint by auth-
ority figures, and methods of attitude change. In
addition, commitment can often be built through the
‘foot in the door’ method in which agreement to a
small request increases the likelihood of subsequent
willingness to engage in more effortful action. To
change behavior on a wider level, one may use
community-based social marketing methods that strat-
egically assess points of leverage for social change,
pilot selected interventions for changing attitudes and
behavior, and replicate the process on a larger scale
(McKenzie-Mohr 2000).
Education for peace is essential in building social
justice and peace, as most people are socialized into
systems of violence (Raviv et al. 1999). In schools,
psychologically informed programs have developed
skills of nonviolent conflict resolution, encouraged
peer mediation of conflicts, enabled cooperative learn-
ing that also reduces excessive competition, and built
curriculi that undermine hatred and stereotypes. Be-
yond schools, education for peace has included ac-
tivities to enable constructive handling of family
conflict, cross-conflict dialogues in divided communi-
ties, and use of mass media to show positive handling
11154
of conflict, to counteract black–white thinking, and to
reduce the excessive emphasis on violence evident in
television and the war-toy industry.
5. Future Directions
Since wounds of past violence create emotional vul-
nerability and enable cycles of violence, building peace
requires the healing of emotional wounds and rec-
onciliation. Programs of humanitarian assistance and
development increasingly include psychosocial activi-
ties aimed at healing the wounds of war through
normalizing activities, expressive arts, reintegration of
former child soldiers, and use of local cultural net-
works and resources. A key task for the future is to find
the most effective, culturally appropriate ways of
rebuilding torn societies. There is great need of
research on reconciliation, the repair of damaged
relationships, and its connection with processes such
as truth-telling, forgiveness, and establishment of
justice. As psychology addresses these issues, it will
examine a wider array of cultures and develop theories
that connect microlevel change in individuals and
small groups with macrolevel changes in societal and
international structures.
See also: Conflict and Conflict Resolution, Social
Psychology of; Dispute Resolution in Economics;
Peace; Peace and Nonviolence: Anthropological
Aspects; Peace Movements; Peacemaking in History;
Religion: Peace, War, and Violence; War: Anth-
ropological Aspects; War: Causes and Patterns; War,
Sociology of
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Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London
Christie D J, Wagner R V, Winter D D 2001 Peace, Conflict
and Violence. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ
Deutsch M, Coleman P 2000 Handbook of Conflict Resolution:
Theory and Practice, 1st edn. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Fisher R 1997 Interacti
e Conflict Resolution. Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, Syracuse, NY
Janis I 1982 Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy
Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd edn. Houghton Mifflin, Boston
Kelman H C, Hamilton V L 1989 Crimes of Obedience. Yale
University Press, New Haven, CT
McKenzie-Mohr D 2000 Fostering sustainable behavior through
community-based social marketing. American Journal of
Psychology 55: 531–7
Pettigrew T F 1998 Intergroup contact theory. Annual Re
iew of
Psychology 49: 65–85
Prunier G 1995 The Rwanda Crisis. Columbia University Press,
New York
Raviv A, Oppenheimer L, Bar-Tal D 1999 How Children
Understand War and Peace. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Rubin J Z, Pruitt D G, Kim S H 1994 Social Conflict, 2nd edn.
McGraw-Hill, New York
Staub E 1989 The Roots of E
il. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK
Tajfel H 1982 Social Identity and Intergroup Relations. Cam-
bridge University Press, New York
Volkan V 1997 Bloodlines, 1st edn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
New York
White R K 1984 Fearful Warriors. Free Press, New York
White R K (ed.) 1986 Psychology and the Pre
ention of Nuclear
War. New York University Press, New York
M. Wessells
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Peacemaking in History
1. Definitions
1.1 Peace and War
War is declared, begun or unleashed, or it breaks out;
peace is concluded, settled, agreed or imposed. Or-
dinary language thus shows an important asymmetry:
war is either the outcome of forces neither side can
fully control, or the result of one-sided action, while
peace has to be established in an effort involving both
sides, unless it is simply the result of the dying out of
fighting or of the annihilation of one side. For the
purpose of this article, peace is defined negatively as
absence of war and other forms of widespread col-
lective fighting. This static definition does not do
justice to the concept of peace as a movement, a
process of improvement with stages in between just a
momentary absence of war and ideal, eternal peace
and harmony. But this positive, dynamic view of peace
concerns a different subject; this article deals only with
the crucial transition from a state of war to a state of
peace. War is defined as a state of collective armed
violence between politically organized, at least de facto
and usually de jure independent communities, during
which special law is valid. The main characteristic of
this law is the relaxation of the rules which prohibit
killing. War does not presuppose continuous fighting.
But if fighting ceases altogether, one can speak of a de
facto peace. Fighting without application of different
law is not war, but anarchy or rebellion. If, later on,
the law of war is recognized by both sides, the rebellion
or the anarchy has developed into internal or ci
il war.
Civil war occurs between parties originally forming
one political community, while war between inde-
pendent communities is external or international war.
With respect to peacemaking, one fundamental
aspect of war has to be mentioned: war has inevitably
the character of an ordeal, of a ‘judgement of God,’ as
power and not justice decides its outcome (Kant 1968).
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Peacemaking in History
1.2 Peacemaking and Pacification
Peacemaking is defined as transition from a state of
war to a state of peace by a deliberate action of the
parties involved. Departing from a differentiation
between three types of peace introduced by Raymond
Aron: equilibrium—hegemony—empire (Aron 1962),
peacemaking is here placed between two extremes
which mark ideal types. Peacemaking proper is charac-
terized by coordination, and hence by full legal
(although not necessarily material) equality and in-
dependence of the parties. If there is a new conflict
between them, it will be international war. Pacification
is characterized by subordination. It implies the legal
extinction of one party as an independent entity by its
incorporation into the other. Usually, it is connected
with an ex post denial of the vanquished’s right to
conduct war by the victor. If there is a new conflict, it
will start as a rebellion and may develop into a civil
war. Each concrete case of war termination can be
situated between these two extremes. For pacification,
an overwhelming victory of one side is a necessary
condition, whereas peacemaking proper tends rather
to be linked with a stalemate. But the relative strength
of the parties is not the only factor deciding the
outcome. There are periods in history during which
pacification prevails.
2. Peacemaking Before the Twentieth Century
The roots of peacemaking lie beyond the grasp of
written sources. Anthropological research as well as
written evidence of transactions between literate and
nonliterate political communities suggest that wher-
ever there is fighting between politically organized
groups, there are also mechanisms to end fighting on
more than just a de facto basis, which presupposes
some reciprocally recognized arrangements, and thus
some reliability and stability. Special oral procedures
to memorize the contents of the transactions are
developed (cf., e.g., the highly elaborate methods of
the North American Indians in their dealings with the
Europeans in the eighteenth century, which the Euro-
peans had to adopt as long as they could not simply
dictate the terms (Franklin 1938)). While the material
stipulations can vary considerably according to the
way of living of the peoples involved, the most
important and the most difficult arrangements concern
guarantees for the keeping and carrying out of the
stipulations. Whatever the intention of those who
conclude the peace, its oral form tends to limit its
scope in time and in space. Frequent renewal, es-
pecially after the death of the head of one of the
contracting parties, is the most important method to
maintain the force of the agreements. Wherever
writing develops, peace treaties are among the first
instruments for which it is used, and they are fre-
quently written on the most durable materials, like
11155
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7