What is it about?
Across conflict and post-conflict societies, the norms people hold about how to behave toward others can either deepen divisions or help bridge them. This special issue brings together 18 research articles examining how social norms shape attitudes toward peace, intergroup cooperation, and conflict resolution across a wide range of sociopolitical contexts. Studies draw on samples from Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Rwanda, Spain, Israel, Togo, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Albania, and beyond, covering both WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations. Topics include how emotion norms affect policy support during violent conflict, how peer and family norms shape youth intergroup contact in divided societies, how framing shapes perceptions of former perpetrators, and how inclusive norms in schools and communities can reduce prejudice and foster belonging. Together, the contributions map the many pathways through which social norms connect to peace and conflict, offering insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
Featured Image
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Why is it important?
At a time when armed conflicts and structural inequalities continue to fracture societies around the world, understanding what drives people toward or away from peace has never been more urgent. This special issue stands out for its breadth, both geographical and methodological, drawing on experimental, longitudinal, qualitative, and cross-national designs. By moving beyond Western samples and incorporating insights from societies navigating active or recent conflict, it builds a more globally grounded picture of how norms function in peacebuilding. The collection also speaks directly to practice: findings on media interventions, educational programmes, and intergroup contact offer actionable guidance for those working to reduce prejudice, promote reconciliation, and foster cohesion in divided communities.
Perspectives
This special issue grew out of a conviction that social norms research has real things to say about peace, not just in the abstract but in the kinds of societies where the stakes are highest. Coordinating a collection of this scope was a demanding and genuinely rewarding process, and I am proud of how much empirical and geographical ground the contributions cover. What strikes me most, looking across the articles, is how consistently the evidence points to the same basic insight: norms that signal inclusion and openness tend to move people toward one another, while those that signal exclusion and threat tend to pull them apart. That may sound simple, but documenting it rigorously across so many different contexts is exactly the kind of cumulative work that makes a field useful to the world beyond academia.
Islam Borinca
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Social norms and peace., Peace and Conflict Journal of Peace Psychology, August 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pac0000761.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
