ABSTRACT

Trust, distrust and conflict between social groups have existed throughout the history of humankind, although their forms have changed. Using three main concepts: culture, representation and dialogue, this book explores and re-thinks some of these changes in relation to concrete historical and contemporary events.

Part I offers a symbolic and historical analysis of trust and distrust while Parts II and III examine trust, distrust and conflict in specific events including the Cyprus conflict, Estonian collective memories, coping with HIV/AIDS in China, Swedish asylum seekers, the Cuban missile crisis and Stalinist confessions. With an impressive array of international contributors the chapters draw on a number of key concepts such as self and other, ingroup and outgroup, contact between groups, categorization, brinkmanship, knowledge, beliefs and myth.

Trust and Conflict offers a fresh perspective on the problems that arise from treating trust, distrust and conflict as simplified indicators. Instead, it proposes that human and social sciences can view these phenomena within the complex matrix of interacting perspectives and meta-perspectives that characterise the social world. As such it will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and lecturers of human and social sciences especially social psychology, sociology, political science and communication studies.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Conflict and trust in dialogical perspective

part |54 pages

Symbolic systems and basic trust

chapter |20 pages

Trust and symbolic systems

Religion and nationhood

chapter |12 pages

Mnemonic communities and conflict

Georgia's national narrative template

part |64 pages

From categorization to social representation

chapter |10 pages

Different and yet human

Categorization and the antecedents of intergroup trust

chapter |22 pages

Intergroup trust and contact in transition

A social representations perspective on the Cyprus conflict

chapter |18 pages

The essentially Other

Representational processes that divide groups

chapter |13 pages

Social categorization and bao in the age of AIDS

The case of China

part |79 pages

Situated trust/distrust: points of contact

chapter |25 pages

Trustworthiness at stake

Trust and distrust in investigative interviews with Russian adolescent asylum-seekers in Sweden

chapter |20 pages

Confession as a communication genre

The logos and mythos of the Party

chapter |16 pages

Concluding comment

Contact without transformation: the context, process and content of distrust