An integrated social psychological investigation of politically-motivated violence in Northern Ireland

Abstract

The project was intended to develop an understanding of the social psychological processes associated with involvement in, and support for, political violence in Northern Ireland, to suggest a potential explanation for why intergroup hostility in the region appears so resistant to change, and to evaluate the utility of Breakwell’s (1993) Integrated Paradigm (IP) as an explanatory tool in terms of both the Northern Ireland conflict, and social psychology more generally. Study one investigated the lived experience of former republican prisoners using in-depth life-history and IPA interviews. It found that participants’ perceptions of historical events coloured their interpretations of the present, and were a key factor in their decision to adopt the republican identity, which in turn was crucial in motivating their behaviour. Study two made use of a web-based questionnaire to investigate this link between perceptions of the past, identity, and behaviour among samples taken from both communities in present day Northern Ireland. The findings supported the link, and suggested that negative intergroup attitudes and behaviours may have been transmitted from the conflict to post-conflict generations. The temporal inter-contextual transferability of the findings suggests that the underlying psychological processes may also be present in other geographical and socio-political contexts. Breakwell's (1993) Integrated Paradigm was successfully used to interpret the findings from both studies, which suggests it could be usefully applied to other areas of research. For these reasons future research could investigate similarities and differences in Northern Ireland and South Africa with a view to improving peacebuilding interventions in Northern Ireland, and refining the IP for the study of post-conflict societies

Date of Award	Jul 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Lesley Storey (Supervisor) & Samuel Pehrson (Supervisor)