Intergroup dynamics and protracted conflicts : an analysis of the Ukraine and Georgia conflicts

The Ukraine and Georgia conflicts have attracted a great deal of attention from scholars and practitioners who seek to explore why these conflicts have emerged and endure. In the literature, the conflicts tend to be treated as outcomes of the Soviet past or as consequences of negative relations between Russia and the EU/NATO. Such research does give valuable insight into why the conflicts emerged. But it does not sufficiently explain why the states and non-state actors involved in the conflicts continue to fail in implementing the conflict resolution efforts that they have all agreed to. This dissertation explores this research puzzle. By linking social constructivism and social psychology, it explores the role the conflict parties' understandings of the situation, self, and other play in shaping conflict protraction. More specifically it engages with how the conflict parties reach such understandings through social cognitive processing, and the role their interacting processing tendencies play in shaping negative intergroup dynamics between them. The dissertation finds that the Ukraine and Georgia conflicts are protracted because the conflict parties struggle over who gets to be a group. The conflicts are thus not between groups per se but between agents who fight over who is present in the conflicts, which groups these agents belong to, and how these groups relate to each other. This struggle occurs as the result of four interacting cognitive tendencies, which the conflict parties resort to when they process conflict stimuli (social information such as behaviour, events, statements made by self or others in the conflict). The first of such tendencies is to process conflict stimulus by adapting self or other identities/interests, or to adapt stimulus so it fits with self or other identities/interests. The second tendency to process the out-group's identity/interests as the outcome of leadership manipulation, and to process in-group identity/interests as the outcome of group think. The third tendency is to process the out-group's intent to be the management of the in-group's identity/interests, and the in-group tendency to manage the out-group's identity/interests. The fourth tendency is to support parts of another conflict party's social cognitive framework, and to point to cognitive support as the cause for conflict protraction. These processing tendencies contribute to conflict protraction as they lead to flexible and opposed group identities, which the conflict parties continuously seek to present as real and distinct. It also leads to continued in-group mobilisation as the conflict parties need to uphold their opposed group identities, to ensure that their constructed in-group identity persists. This interaction leads to a cognitive struggle over how to, and who gets to, establish the social boundaries that define the conflicts. The Ukraine and Georgia conflicts are therefore not only protracted because there is a conflict between EU/NATO and Russia, nor because conflict narratives or self/other understandings are cemented. They are also protracted because the conflict parties continue to engage in processing tendencies, which shape a struggle over who gets to group the agents present in the conflict and thus by extension of this, who gets to be a group.