The Consequences of Victimization on Political Identities

Abstract

This article explores the impact of war-related traumatic experiences on political identities and political behavior by exploring different pieces of empirical evidence from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the Franco dictatorship (1939–75), and its aftermath. On one hand, the author analyzes semistructured interviews of survivors of the civil war and the dictatorship; on the other hand, she assesses data from a specialized survey implemented on a representative sample of the Spanish population. The analyses broadly suggest that, controlling for family leanings during the civil war, victimization experiences during the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship lead to the rejection of the perpetrators’ identities along the political cleavage that was salient during the war (i.e., left–right). The survey analysis also indicates that (1) although grudges related to severe wartime violations are transmitted through generations, moderate wartime violations do not have such a long-term political impact; (2) the political effects of victimization do not increase with proximity to the traumatic events (i.e., age); and (3) victimization experiences do not have a significant impact on identities along cleavages that were not salient during the war (i.e., center–periphery).

Disappearing dissent? Repression and state consolidation in Mexico

“…Finally, Dell & Querubin (2016a) find that US-led counterinsurgency bombings in Vietnam had a negative effect on local governance, 9 while Dell & Querubin (2016b) show that historical norms of governance -whether a village had a bureaucratic state or a patron-client state more than a hundred years ago -continues to shape living standards today. A parallel literature on violence offers theoretical arguments and sophisticated empirical tests regarding the long-term effects of violence at both the individual and community levels, showing how violence affects voting behavior (Berrebi & Klor, 2006;Montalvo, 2010;Getmansky & Zeitzoff, 2014;Weintraub et al, 2015), community participation (Bateson, 2013), civilian mobilization (Schubiger, 2013;Osorio et al, 2017), and attitudes towards former perpetrators across generations (Balcells, 2012;Lupu & Peisakhin, 2017). We draw on these strands of the literature to motivate a focus on a diverse set of factors related to state consolidation.…”

Sect, Nation, and Identity after the Fall of Mosul: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

“…Despite these theoretical insights, there remains little systematic empirical work investigating the identity consequences of conflict. Instead, owing to the dangers of conducting social inquiry in conflict settings, the scholarship that does exist relies on post-war surveys to gauge longer-term effects of war, or threat of war, on social and political identities (Balcells 2012;Dyrstad 2012;Gibler et al 2012;Lupu and Peisakhin 2017) or investigates the identity consequences of elections 28/06/2014 p.2. 8 and exposure to violence short of war (Eifert et al 2010;Gutiérrez-Romero 2014).…”

“…An "endogenous-cleavages thesis", by contrast, sees that "the violence observed during a civil war is not necessarily only a reflection of existing cleavages but may create new ones or give new content to existing ones" (Kalyvas and Kocher 2007, 204). Secondly, a conception of identity as exogenous occludes potential 8 Balcells (2012), as well as Lupu and Peisakhin (2017)), use specialized post-war surveys to assess the intergenerational transmission of political identities. Dyrstad (2012) uses before and after surveys in Bosnia wherein the time lag to assess the effect of the war 'treatment' is considerable (eight years), while Gibler and colleagues (2012) use cross-national survey data combined with Correlates of War data wherein territorial threat is coded as a dichotomous measure of military dispute occurrence in the five years prior to the survey being fielded.…”

“…While there is little empirical work on the effects of Islamist-led conflict on faith-based identity attachments, the literature does provide evidence of the rejection of political identities in response to victimization by their representatives (Balcells 2012;Rozenas et al 2017). …”

Local violence and politics in KwaZulu-Natal: perceptions of agency in a post-conflict society

“…12 By contrast, Balcells' work on victimisation and political participation and identity in Spain among those exposed to that country's civil war, finds that in the long run, survivors of violence do not increase their political participation to any significant extent. 13 We Movement (UDF), and only a small share of the interviewees had changed political affiliation over the years.…”