ABSTRACT
From its beginning to its end, the history of the twentieth century, like others before it, was stained with instances of genocide and bloody intergroup conflicts. From the slaughter of Armenians in 1915 to the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, the capacity for groups to inflict suffering and death on each other on large scales seems tragically not to have diminished. The twenty-first century has started no more auspiciously as events in Afghanistan, Darfur and Iraq reveal. Nevertheless, despite all this appalling bloodshed, one encouraging feature has been the emergence of political debate over the desirability of perpetrator groups accepting responsibility for what they have done, and offering material reparations or other symbols of collective remorse to the victims of their misdeeds (Barkan, 2000; Buruma, 1994; Steele, 1990). Within social psychology this debate has instigated theory and research into the social psychological antecedents and consequences of such emotions as group-based guilt and shame that may be experienced by members of “perpetrator” groups (e.g., Branscombe & Doosje, 2004; Leach, Snider, & Iyer, 2002), and parallel, though less extensive, investigations into the emotions and attitudes of “victim” groups towards perpetrators (Hewstone, Cairns, Voci, McLernon, Niens, & Noor, 2004; Nadler & Liviatan, 2004; Wohl & Branscombe, 2005). In this chapter I review some of our1
recent work which has been variously concerned with both sides of this perpetrator-victim relationship.
