Editorial.

Abstract

I first came across the expansive and influential work of Morton Deutsch (1920Deutsch ( -2017 as a student doing research in social categorization and intergroup relations in England during the 1970s. This was an era when European researchers were eager to develop a distinctly European social psychology, set apart from American social psychology. Henri Tajfel, my PhD examiner, led the charge toward a more social social psychology in Europe, and his associates, including Serge Moscovici and Willem Doise, and students, including John Turner and Michael Billig, were critical of what they saw to be reductionism and a lack of explicit attention to ideology in the American approach to understanding intergroup relations and conflict. Deutsch's seminal 1973 book, The Resolution of Conflict: Constructive and Destructive Processes, became a particular target of European criticism. The celebration of Deutsch's legacy through the first set of papers published in this issue presents an opportunity to highlight and clarify an important but often overlooked contribution made by Deutsch.Deutsch's analyses of the "spiral of conflict" brought attention to certain psychological processes that, once set on motion, under certain conditions could act in a largely automatic and independent manner. This points to context-independent processes, where the ideology of the groups and individuals involved becomes less relevant. Deutsch was not the only researcher in that era pointing to such destructive, self-perpetuating collective processes: the important work on groupthink, the tendency to make decisions collectively in a way that negates individual responsibility and creativity, is another notable example. The main feature of these collective processes is that they can influence group and intergroup dynamics, independent from many group characteristics (such as whether a group is politically left-wing or right-wing, mixed-sex or female-only or male-only, etc.).Following the papers celebrating Deutsch in this issue, seven major papers are presented. The first six explore peace and conflict through a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods; the seventh is a paper by a major figure in peace psychology, Richard Wagner, looking back on his professional life and gleaning insights into the psychology of peace and conflict. I am emphasizing the diversity of quantitative and qualitative methods, because one of the goals of this journal is to publish the full range of research methodologies and to include studies that adopt nontraditional methods. My working assumption is that the psychological study of peace and conflict will make more progress when the full range of available quantitative, qualitative, and mix-methodologies is adopted.The first two studies use qualitative methods to give voice to two groups who are the victims of conflict but seldom have an opportunity to speak out in public: Sierra Leonean women and members of the public in Afghanistan. The conflict in Sierra Leone during the 1990s was highly destructive and costly, bo...