Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

218 Kathleen H. Dockett and Doris North-Schulte
In spite of all the efforts of organizations such as the United Nations and the
Peace Institute, the continued prevalence of national ethnic conflicts and violent
attacks on individuals around the world based on ethnic affiliation, “race,” or religion
has created an urgent need to seek “new” ways to lessen ethnic conflict and to
promote harmony among peoples of the world. Since World War II, there have
been numerous attempts to analyze the psychology of hatred, ethnic conflict,
wars, genocide, and their effects on the individual and the group, beginning with
the Holocaust studies (Arendt, 1963) and continuing to the present day (Chirot &
Seligman, 2001). Chirot (2001) suggests that psychology’s contribution to
understanding ethnopolitical conflict has been modest, growing largely out of
theories of group conflict, with issues surrounding identity formation being little
understood.
Causes of Ethnopolitical Conflict, War, and Genocide
Staub’s (1998, 2001) empirically based theory of group violence has identified
patterns of events that instigate and predispose a culture toward genocidal or
group violence. Conditions that instigate genocide include: (a) difficult conditions
of life in a society such as economic problems, political conflict, and/or great
social change; (b) conflicts involving vital interests such as territory needed for living;
(c) conflict between dominant and subordinate groups, and (d) a history of
conflict and antagonisms between groups. Other factors include scapegoating of a
group as responsible for the difficult life conditions, and the escalation of harmful
acts along the continuum of destruction, depending on the behavior of community
leaders, elites, and bystanders internal and external to the community. Staub
(1998) also identified a set of predisposing cultural factors that when present in
combination make genocidal or group violence more likely. These include (a) a
history of devaluation of some group that is part of the culture, for example as
unintelligent or lazy, (b) monolithic versus pluralistic society, (c) authority orientation,
and (d) unhealed group trauma of previously persecuted groups who are
more likely to react to new threats with violence.
Central to both instigating and precipitating factors is the existence of groupbased
identities and conflict involving those identities. One can observe this in the
aftermath of the Cold War in 1989, when the genesis of wars shifted from national
states toward groupings of people that Kimmel (1999) calls “cultural states.”
According to Fukuyama (as cited in Kimmel, 1999, p. 57), “The emergence of
‘cultural states’ is related to a decline in the power of national states, both
internally (a loss of patriotism) and externally (a breakdown of international relations).”
“As a national state is superceded by cultural movements of peoples
whose identities are anchored in existential feelings, called primordial sentiments
(Geertz as cited in Kimmel, 1999), the individual’s sense of being a state citizen