Psychological Explanation, Social Representations and Genocide

Abstract

The nature of state sanctioned mass murder owes as much of its character to history, economics, politics, and ideology as it does to psychology. The current paper reviews the scope of psychological analysis and presents an alternative framework for analyzing the causes and consequences of genocide using Moscovici's theory of social representations, which argues that widespread beliefs in the form of social (consensual) representations are major organizing agents for individual thought and action. The principal task in studying genocide through social representations is to unearth the 'common sense' of ethnic mass murder. In this scheme a prime explanatory role is given to historical representations. In the Bosnian context it is evident that historical and contemporary representations played a major role in galvanizing, organizing and directing a significant section of the Serbs' intellectual, cognitive and behavioral resources toward a project (simultaneously personal, social and political in nature) in which the Bosnian State and the Muslim population within it were to be threatened with extinction.