GIPGAP – Page 2 – Engaging Peace

Government’s right to invade: National differences in views

Posted on May 23, 2011May 22, 2011 by kathiemm

In response to the attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States and its allies waged war against Afghanistan. The Gallup International Terrorism Poll 2001 showed that 88% of the American public agreed with this military action.

In the months preceding the start of the Iraq war, national support for invasion never dropped below 55%, probably reflecting the Bush administration’s framing of the Iraq war as an extension of the “war on terror.”

Protest in Spain against Iraq war. Photo by Francisco M. Marzoa Alonso; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license.

In contrast, the Flash Eurobarometer 151 surveyed citizens of the 15 European Union nations in 2003 and found strong opposition in some nations to the U.S. involvement in Iraq. In particular, Greeks and Spaniards viewed the U.S. as the greatest threat to peace–more threatening than Iran and North Korea.

The Group on International Perspectives on Government Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP) administered the Personal and Institutional Rights to Aggression and Peace Survey (PAIRTAPS) to ordinary people from the U.S., Greece, and Spain in 2005. We found that Americans rated a governmental right to undertake an invasion much more highly than Greeks and Spaniards.

In regard to specific arguments made by the participants in support of their ratings concerning the acceptability of invasion:

Significantly more Greeks and Spaniards than Americans said war is outdated or there are better ways to solve conflicts.
Significantly more Americans than Spaniards referred to “defense” in their explanations, including references to preemptive action in response to a threat.

What do you make of the findings of this study? Is war outdated? Are there better ways of solving conflicts?

Why might Americans seem to be more worried about defending themselves than Spaniards and Greeks? Why might there be national differences in views concerning preemptive strikes?

Do you think that if a new sample of Americans, Greeks, and Spaniards were to be asked today about the US involvement in Iraq, their opinions would have changed?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

[Note: This post was adapted from an article by Maria Daskalopoulos, Tanvi Zaveri and Kathie Malley-Morrison, in Peace Psychology (a publication of the American Psychological Association), Winter, 2006.]

Negative versus positive definitions of peace

Posted on May 16, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Our research team, the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP), values the distinction between positive and negative peace:

Negative peace refers to definitions that identify peace with the absence of war or armed conflict.
Positive peace refers to definitions that focus on the prerequisites and criteria for a sustainable peace, including respect for universal human rights (which are not synonymous with the legal rights granted by any particular legal authority).

According to GIPGAP’s research, to be discussed more in later posts, in the U.S. it is the negative peace definitions that predominate. Why is this?

The major public media in this country certainly do little to promote the idea of peace per se, let alone positive peace.

A report released by the Institute for Economics and Peace in October 2010 described a study regarding violence and peace in television programs. Included in the research were 37 news and current affairs programs from 23 networks in 15 countries, including the United States.

Overall, only 1.6% of the stories examined in the study considered issues of positive peace. However, there was some variation across the countries in amount of media time devoted to issues of violence. According to the report, “Of the 10 TV programs with the highest level of violence coverage, 8 are from the United States or the United Kingdom.”

This research suggests both a lack of interest in peace as a product of respect for human rights and a conviction that “violence sells.” Therefore, is it surprising that when most Americans think about peace, they see it primarily as just an absence of war?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Reconciliation in Rwanda

Posted on May 12, 2011May 28, 2011 by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Today’s post comes from Andrew Potter, an Engaging Peace intern and regular commenter, and a member of GIPGAP. Andrew will be traveling to Rwanda in early June.]

As many people know, in 1994, Rwanda, in East Africa, was plagued by a 100 day genocide that left more than 800,000 Tutsis (20% of the population) dead and thousands displaced. Two Hutu militias were primarily responsible; however, the genocide was coordinated by the Hutu national government and the media played a crucial role in urging ordinary Hutu civilians to participate in the slaughter.

Sixteen years have passed since that bloody summer and today Rwanda is described as one of the safest and least corrupt African nations. Nevertheless, Rwanda’s future is uncertain.

Some human rights groups describe Rwanda as “orderly yet repressive,” and wonder if the current government is more a dressed up dictatorship than an authentic democracy. Kagame (former RPF Tutsi opposition leader) has pulled the country from shambles by using hardline policies, such as shutting down independent media and imprisoning all those who utter the words Tutsi or Hutu in an offensive way.

At this point Rwanda stands at a juncture between its horrific past and the possibility of a promising future. It is my intention to visit Rwanda during the first two weeks of June, equipped with a video camera, in order to document ongoing efforts at reconciliation.

I will be traveling alongside Nathan Felde, chair of the design department at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. We hope to return able to recount the experiences of the Rwandan people in their recovery from genocide.

Andrew Potter

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Please contribute to Andrew’s trip and documentary work through your Amazon.com purchases. First go to engagingpeace.com and click on the Amazon link in the sidebar. All proceeds coming to Engaging Peace from Amazon.com in May and June will be contributed to Andrew’s trip.]

Ordinary people: Thoughts about war and peace

Posted on February 3, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Ever since 9/11, the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP) has been studying the views of ordinary people concerning war and peace and related issues.

We started our work at Boston University but soon attracted psychologists and other social scientists from around the world to work with us on the project.

We have investigated, for example, the extent to which people from different countries, different continents, different religions, different ethnicities, and different genders define terms like “war” and “peace” in similar—or different—ways. We have also studied people’s justifications for invading other countries or torturing prisoners of war, and explored the extent to which such justifications vary among people from different countries, religions, etc.

We have findings from countries as diverse as the United States, Iceland, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, South Africa, India, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Peru, and Nicaragua.

Consider what you know about government-sponsored aggression around the world. In what countries do you think the greatest support for government-sponsored aggression can be found? We’ll report some findings in our next post.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology