Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible if Brady Wagoner had not given me the opportunity to present the vision of a genetic social psychology at the annual Niels Bohr lecture at the Centre for Cultural Psychology of Aalborg University on 23–24 August 2021, and without his enthusiasm to turn both the talk and the various commentaries on it into a book. I also want to thank Brady for inviting the commentaries and handling their editing, as well as giving me feedback and ideas about the revision of the first part of the book where I propose genetic social psychology as a past and future discipline. By the time the book went to press, social psychology lost a great mind and person, Ivana Marková, who contributed to this volume a commentary. We will miss the intellectually engaging discussions with such a deep thinker. I would like to thank Alex Gillespie, Tania Zittoun, José Antonio Castorina, Mario Carretero, Alicia Barreiro, Cathy Nicholson, Gordon Sammut, Christina Alexopoulos and Angela Bermúdez for their valuable commentaries in this book. Christina Alexopoulos, Pavlos Pavlou and Costas M. Constantinou read an earlier version of the book and made valuable comments for revisions. I also benefited a lot from insightful comments by Anne-Nelly Perret Clermont on Piaget and emotion. Anne-Nelly has always supported my career and enriched my ideas with her wisdom, and I take the opportunity now to thank her for everything. Similarly, I want to thank Jaan Valsiner for his support throughout these years in his various travels and intellectual exchanges, with the more recent one being in the context of the Cultural Psychology European Doctoral Network in Sociocultural Psychology (CuPsyNet) in 2023 in Cyprus, which enriched the analysis of my autobiographical narrative in this book. I also want to thank Professor Fathali M. Moghaddam for his hospitality in publishing this book in his Cambridge University Press Progressive Psychology series and for the series foreword in this volume, as well as David Repetto and Sari Wastell at the Press, our project manager Shreyasi Saha and our copy editor Mark Fox for their hard work and endless patience in bringing this process to fruition. I thank Cyprus Dialogue Forum for the reproduction of the very helpful infographic about the chronology of negotiations in Cyprus for the solution of the Cyprus issue and the journalist Sefa Karahasan for his generosity in allowing the use of his beautiful photo as the image for the cover of the book.
This volume is the result of a journey initiated at the start of this century at the University of Cambridge. In 2000, as soon as I started my studies for an MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology at the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, I met Tania Zittoun, Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish. We all worked around issues related to social and developmental psychology and formed a small reading group that I now recognise as the first arena for the formation of my theoretical ideas. Brady Wagoner later joined our group, and we were all greatly influenced in our ideas and appreciation of an integrative approach to social and developmental psychology by the late Gerard Duveen’s depth of intellect, who supervised our work. In the same context of ideas around the MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology in later years, we had the opportunity to work together with Anna Zapiti, Irini Kadianaki and Seamus Power, whom I also want to thank for their valuable contributions to the development of research and ideas reported here. I view the proposal presented in this book as continuing along the vision proposed by the late Gerard Duveen as genetic social psychology.
Turning my attention to issues related to the Cyprus conflict and intergroup relations was the result of my engagement with the work of Chara Makriyianni on history teaching in post-conflict Cyprus and my work at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup Conflict under the supervision of Professor Miles Hewstone whom I would like to thank for the introduction to the world of the study of intergroup relations from a social psychological perspective. Chara was influential on my thinking in more ways than one, as she was later to become my wife. Our initiative with other colleagues to establish the first bicommunal non-governmental organisation in divided Cyprus relating to history teaching (the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research [AHDR]) and my engagement with themes of interest to civil society, conflict resolution and peace making would be impossible without her inspirational influence. AHDR has been a learning experience for me, and I want to thank all founding members of AHDR and more recent personnel for their continuing efforts for the reunification of Cyprus, critical historical approach and peace education, as well as the various research projects that we had the chance to co-operate on.
Throughout these years various funding bodies supported our work, and I would like to thank them all, in alphabetical order: A.G. Leventis Foundation, Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, Corpus Christi College Research Scholarship, Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation, EU under the Cypriot Civil Society in Action I Programme, Grow Civic Programme financed by the European Union in the Turkish Cypriot community, LSE Hellenic Observatory, Nuffield Foundation, UNDP-Act and the University of Cyprus for its internal funding and Onisilos post-doctoral grants. I also want to thank the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy for funding the European Social Survey in Cyprus. I also extend my gratitude to the International Society for Political Psychology for the 2024 Nevitt Sanford Award for Professional Contributions to Political Psychology.
Special thanks go to my good friend and research partner, Professor Neophytos Loizides of Warwick University, since through our collaboration and his support with various projects funded by Leverhulme Trust (RF-2014-401), the US Institute of Peace (G-1703-172) and the British Academy (AF16002) we were able to collect many of the data used for this book in both communities of Cyprus and to publish together various papers mentioned in this volume. Neophytos and the other members of our team from other disciplines beyond psychology (Edward Morgan Jones, Laura Sudulic, Djordje Stefanovic, Raluca Popp), as well as Daniella Donno and Deniz Yucel, helped me to expand my horizons into the importance of the political, sociological and international relations perspective beyond my original training in education and psychology.
Data collection with large representative samples in both communities of Cyprus would not have been possible without the help of Andrea Nicolaou, Evangelos Georgiou and Maria Perivolaraki working with me at the University Centre for Field Studies of the University of Cyprus (UCFS). I also want to thank the field researchers working at UCFS and Evangelos Georgiou who prepared the table in Appendix C of the book.
The contributions of Huseyin Cakal and Maria Ioannou from the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup Conflict to this research programme are invaluable. I want to thank Eliz Tefik, Mine Yucel, Huseyin Cakal, Shenel Husnu and Deniz Yucel for their co-operation over these years in making possible research in the Turkish Cypriot community of Cyprus, thus giving voice to the views of all Cypriots across the existing divide. Huseyin and Shenel should also be thanked along with Irini Kadianaki, Maria Ioannou, Eleni Lytras, and Kyriakos Pachoullides for their efforts and inspiration to work together for the benefit of social psychology in Cyprus beyond ethnic divisions and for the establishment of the Cyprus Association of Social Psychology (CASP) in 2007. I also want to thank Huseyin Cakal, Irini Kadianaki, Marios Kyriakides, Eleni Lytra, Orkun Yetkili, Maria Ioannou, Andreas Michael, Nazife Fuat and Dize Irkad, who, as the new board of CASP in a constitutional assembly in 2019, unanimously decided to change the constitution of CASP to have a board of a federal structure with two co-presidents.
Feedback from PhD students in our genetic social psychology lab at the University of Cyprus has been very valuable, and I want to thank them for that. I specifically want to thank Eleni Anastasiou for preparing the index of the book. Post-doctoral researchers at our lab, Maria Avraamidou, Christiana Karayianni and Dora Georgiou, contributed various ideas relating to the study of media, communication and transitional justice.
I also want to thank Ayse Uskul, Borja Martinovic and Neophytos Loizides who honoured me with being part of their successful European Research Council (ERC) applications (HONORLOGIC, OWNERS and PEACERETURN, respectively), and for including me as the Cyprus partner in their international networks. Similarly, I want to thank Laurent Licata for leading the COST action 1205 that brought together for the first time historians, history teachers and social psychologists, and Mario Carretero for leading MAKINGHISTORIES of similar interdisciplinary composition more recently. The writing up of this book was also supported by MAKINGHISTORIES, 101086106, Marie Curie Staff Exchange (EU). Participation in all these networks has greatly enhanced the interdisciplinarity of my proposal in this book.
Finally, as always, I want to thank my family and in-laws for their support in bringing up our son Maximos and for their resilience as internally displaced persons after 1974 in offering the next two generations of our family everything they could.
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