Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Peace Making: The Influence of Instigating Beliefs about Losses

2 One of the fundamental questions that preoccupies students of conflict resolution as well as practitioners of the international community is how to overcome the psychological barriers that are a major obstacle to peace making and building in societies involved in serious and violent conflicts. These conflicts are over real goods such as territories, natural resources, self-determination, and/or basic values and the real issues of goals contradictions have to be addressed in conflict resolution. But, no doubt it would be much easier to resolve them, had they not been accompanied by an intense socio-psychological repertoire, which becomes an investment in conflict and evolves into a foundation of culture of conflict. It is rigid and resistant to change, fuels its continuation, inhibits de-escalation of the conflict and thus serves as the major barrier to its peaceful resolution. One of the basic challenges for societies involved in intractable conflict which aspire to embark on the road of peace is to overcome these barriers and begin to construct a new repertoire that facilitates the process of peace making and prepares the society members to live in peace. The present chapter will examine ways of overcoming the psychological barriers to peace process and outline initial ideas that may be helpful in stimulating further thoughts and empirical research. The chapter will first briefly introduce the nature of intractable conflict and the culture of conflict that evolves with it and gives rise to the psychological barriers that prevent the peaceful conflict resolution and reconciliation. The main part of the chapter will describe ways of overcoming the psychological barriers, focusing on the role of instigating beliefs concerning losses of the parties involved in conflict. This part will first discuss the process of unfreezing. Then it will present the notion of instigating beliefs that motivate the reevaluation of the conflict situation. Finally the chapter will 3 describe the notion of mediating beliefs that appear on the way of evolving alternative societal beliefs of ethos of peace which are necessary for peace building. Conflicts are an inseparable part of every intergroup relation but we focus on those conflicts that are prolonged, harsh and violent, often called intractable. 1 In these conflicts the involved societies evolve culture of conflict of which the dominant parts are societal beliefs 2 of collective memories and of ethos of conflict, as well as collective emotional orientation (Bar-Tal, 2007a). Collective memory of conflict evolves to …