Abstract
Believing that something is ‘ours’ is omnipresent. For instance, I might often go to a café together with a group of friends and I can develop the belief that this is ‘our’ café. Importantly, in order to believe that something is ‘ours’ it does not need to be legally ‘ours’.
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This belief has been entitled ‘collective psychological ownership’. Collective psychological ownership tends to come along with certain perceived entitlements and rights, such as the right to use, occupy or control what is believed to be owned. Consequently, collective ownership beliefs can have consequences for how one relates to other groups. When one feels that something is ‘ours’, this might be accompanied by negative attitudes towards relevant outgroups who are perceived as intruding or trespassing on what is believed to be owned by one’s ingroup. One can develop ownership beliefs regarding all kinds of targets. Just as I can believe that a certain café is ‘ours’, I can also believe that a workspace is ‘ours’ or even a larger entity such as an entire country. In this dissertation, I took a social psychological perspective in order to research territorial ownership beliefs in conflict regions. I investigated how ingroup identification and perceptions of collective victimization relate to territorial ownership beliefs (ingroup, outgroup and shared ownership beliefs) in conflict regions, and how these ownership beliefs, in turn, relate to the willingness to reconcile the conflict with the respective outgroup. For this research, I used data collected among the general populations of Serbs and Albanians regarding the Kosovo conflict, of Israeli Jews regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Greek Cypriots regarding the conflict in Cyprus. While these three conflicts differ to some extent, they are similar in the way that in each of them, two ethnically different groups tend to believe that the same piece of land is rightfully ‘theirs’.
I provided evidence that ingroup identification as well as collective victimization beliefs are relevant to consider for understanding who believes more in ingroup, outgroup, or shared ownership of contested territory. Moreover, I showed that collective territorial ownership beliefs are important when we want to better understand reconciliation intentions in territorial conflict regions. Importantly, I found that, while ingroup ownership beliefs seem to be the default in conflict settings—with rather negative consequences for intergroup relations—beliefs that the outgroup owns the territory (as well) were also present to some extent. These outgroup or shared ownership beliefs were stronger among those who did not view their ingroup as superior and those who recognized that both groups had suffered in the past. Thus, it might be possible to evoke and stimulate outgroup or shared ownership through public discourses that either de-emphasize ingroup superiority or emphasize collective victimhood. The shared ownership beliefs that might be developed based on these public discourses are important since they provide a pathway to more positive intergroup relations in conflict regions and to intergroup reconciliation and conflict resolution specifically.
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