Editor's note. James L. Pate served as action editor for this article.Author's note. I thank Blaine Fowers, Dennis Fox, Ora Prilleltensky, and Frank Richardson for their thoughtful comments on early versions of this article. Their help and support are very much appreciated.

The power to promote wellness, resist oppression, and foster liberation is grounded in psychological and political dynamics. Hitherto, these two sources of power have been treated in isolation, both for descriptive and prescriptive purposes. As a result, we lack an integrative theory that explains the role of power in promoting human welfare and preventing suffering, and we lack a framework for combining psychological and political power for the purpose of social change. In this article, the author puts forth a psychopolitical conceptualization of power, wellness, oppression, and liberation. Furthermore, he introduces the concept of psychopolitical validity, which is designed to help community psychologists to put power issues at the forefront of research and action. Two types of psychopolitical validity are introduced: type I-epistemic, and type II-transformative. Whereas the former demands that psychological and political power be incorporated into community psychology studies; the latter requires that interventions move beyond ameliorative efforts and towards structural change.

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The purpose of this paper is to articulate a rationale for value-based praxis in community psychology. Although values need to promote personal, collective, and relational wellness at the same time, it is argued that community psychologists pay more attention to personal and relational wellness than to collective wellness. In order to address this imbalance it is important to promote the value of social justice. While praxis requires that we engage in a cycle of reflection, research, and social action, community psychologists devote more resources to the first two phases of praxis than to the last one. This paper offers a framework for deciding what values and what praxis considerations we should attend to and how we may advance social justice and social action in community psychology.

I argue that distinct conditions of justice lead to diverse wellness outcomes through a series of psychosocial processes. Optimal conditions of justice, suboptimal conditions of justice, vulnerable conditions of injustice, and persisting conditions of injustice lead to thriving, coping, confronting, and suffering, respectively. The processes that mediate between optimal conditions of justice and thriving include the promotion of responsive conditions, the prevention of threats, individual pursuit, and avoidance of comparisons. The mechanisms that mediate between suboptimal conditions of justice and coping include resilience, adaptation, compensation, and downward comparisons. Critical experiences, critical consciousness, critical action, and righteous comparisons mediate between vulnerable conditions of injustice and confrontation with the system. Oppression, internalization, helplessness, and upward comparisons mediate between persisting conditions of injustice and suffering. These psychosocial processes operate within and across personal, interpersonal, organizational and community contexts. Different types of justice are hypothesized to influence well-being within each context. Intrapersonal injustice operates at the personal level, whereas distributive, procedural, relational, and developmental justice impact interpersonal well-being. At the organizational level, distributive, procedural, relational and informational justice influence well-being. Finally, at the community level, distributive, procedural, retributive, and cultural justice support community wellness. Data from a variety of sources support the suggested connections between justice and well-being.

My first objective in this paper is to synthesize, synoptically, the literature on oppression and liberation with the contributions to this special issue. To fulfil this aim I introduce a framework for understanding, resisting, and overcoming oppression. The framework consists of psychopolitical well-being; experiences, consequences, and sources of oppression; and actions toward liberation. Each of these components is subdivided into 3 domains of oppression and well-being: collective, relational, and personal. Experiences of suffering as well as resistance and agency are part of the framework. My second objective is to offer ways of closing the gap between research and action on oppression and liberation. To do so I suggest 2 types of psychopolitical validity: epistemic and transformative.

There is little doubt that psychology has left its imprint on 20th century society. There shouM also be little doubt that socioeconomic, cultural, and political trends have shaped the methods and content of the discipline to a large extent. However, an alleged immunity to ideological influences within the profession has obstructed an indepth examination of the interaction between social forces and psychology. The penetration of the prevalent ideology in the realm of psychological knowledge often results not only in an uncritical acceptance of the status quo but also in an active endorsement of it. Desiderata for a psychology at the service of social change are considered.

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