Social Identity, Legitimacy, and Intergroup Conflict: The Rocky Road to Reconciliation
Social Identity, Legitimacy, and Intergroup Conflict: The Rocky Road to Reconciliation
This chapter argues that legitimacy is a double-edged sword, providing a constraint not only on discrimination, but also on resistance that might lead injustice to be challenged. The chapter is structured as follows. First, it outlines accounts that see discrimination between groups as almost inevitable products of our group nature, and then challenge this view. This leads into a discussion of how legitimacy and the content of group identity (norms and stereotypes) form bases by which discrimination may be constrained. It considers evidence from four domains to provide empirical support for the legitimacy constraint argument: (1) social stereotyping, (2) in-group bias and discrimination, (3) emotion-based forms of prejudice (specifically intergroup schadenfreude), and (4) perceptions of group (in)justice. Finally, the chapter considers how reconciliation fits into this social identity analysis of intergroup conflict tempered by legitimacy constraints, and indeed how it can add to it.
Keywords: intergroup relations, legitimacy, discrimination, group identity, social stereotyping, in-group bias, prejudice, reconciliation
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .