Setting the Scene: Internal Conflicts and Joint Collective Action

The picture on the cover of the book was taken on 7 March 2020 next to the Greek Cypriot checkpoint by a journalist who was in the UN-patrolled buffer zone at the centre of divided Nicosia. It depicts both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot demonstrators who were jointly protesting the closure of this checkpoint one week earlier on Saturday, 29 February 2020, by the authorities of the Republic of Cyprus over coronavirus disease (COVID-19) concerns. The Greek Cypriot police clashed with Turkish Cypriot protesters in Nicosia a week later, on 7 March, as demonstrators denounced, twice in a week, the closure of the Ledra Street checkpoint in the UN-controlled buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Greek Cypriot police reportedly used pepper spray or tear gas on some Turkish Cypriot protesters near the checkpoint. One week earlier some 200 Greek Cypriot protesters at the pedestrian Ledra Street checkpoint barged through the same police barricades, scuffling with officers, and crossed to the north, despite efforts to stop them. There they were joined by Turkish Cypriot protesters.

It is worth noting that on the day of these protests there was no reported confirmed case of COVID-19 in either the south or the north of the Cyprus divide. This fact, the protesters argued, suggested that COVID-19 was being used as an excuse to close the checkpoints and prevent free movement on the island. In the minds of the protesters there was a series of developments after the most recent failure at Crans Montana Switzerland to resolve the Cyprus problem in July 2017 that suggested Nicos Anastasiades, president of the Republic of Cyprus and Greek Cypriot leader in the negotiations to solve the Cyprus issue, was becoming comfortable with the idea of partitioning Cyprus. They thought he started negotiating the partition of Cyprus with Turkey behind closed doors without any mandate from the people who elected him to do so and was undermining the agency of the pro-reconciliation and pro-BBF (Bizonal Bicommunal Federation) Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci by taking unilateral actions of this kind. Interestingly, in the same period, pro-federalist Akinci was also undermined by Turkey’s pressing for the abandonment of the BFF model in favour of a two-state solution in Cyprus. This shift in policy by Turkey was accompanied by increasing tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean around the contested areas of the Exclusive Economic Area (EEZ) and hydrocarbon findings and antagonising Greece in the Aegean Sea.

This was the first time any of the crossings have been shut for any reason after 2003 when some checkpoints opened for the first time since the war of 1974 and the complete geographical division of Cyprus. The first crossing point to open was the Ledra Palace in April 2003, but Ledra Street did not open until April 2008 when the Greek Cypriot leader Demetris Christofias and the Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat were the Cyprus interlocutors, both coming from leftsist, pro-reconciliation and pro-BBF parties.

The protestors on 29 February 2020 and 7 March 2020 held banners ‘Open all and more checkpoints. Reunite Cyprus’, ‘Unite Cyprus Now’ and ‘Stop the divisionist virus’. The image of a Turkish Cypriot female protestor making a hand gesture in the form of a heart captured very well the demonstrators’ vision of their island as that of love and not of war and division, and it was an apt expression of the feelings and affective state of that part of society: the bicommunal movement and activists that valued intercommunal contacts, friendships and social relationships. They experienced this closure of checkpoints as a direct attack on their vision and efforts for reunification.

This act was an expression of a position in the representational field of the Cyprus issue discovered by bicommunal research since 2007 (Psaltis, Reference Psaltis, Marková and Gillespie2012a), only four years after the opening of the checkpoints, but its clarity and importance in the consciousness of people as a motivation for joint collective action were the result of a process of a historical change that took almost a generation after the opening of the checkpoints. It was catalysed by the disappointment of the Crans Montana failure where the two communities of Cyprus came very close to a commonly agreed peace plan the principles of which were proposed by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres as the ‘Guterres framework’. But probably more important here was the uneasy feeling that potentially corrupt politicians were ready to partition Cyprus for their own financial interests.

One had to go back in the history of Cyprus to the British colonial era, to the miners’ strike in 1936 and all-female spinners’ strike in 1938 (Rappas, Reference Rappas2009), to point out an event in which both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots were involved in joint collective action against an administration. But the particular event depicted on the cover of the book also exhibited some unnerving parallels with the joint revolts of the two communities against corrupt local elites that went back to the era of Ottoman rule. These elites colluded with the Ottoman rulers to financially exploit the islanders from both communities. At other times the same elites even made fortunes by breaking sanctions exporting wheat to Malta when the local people were starving to death (Hadjykiriakos, Reference Hadjikyriacou2023).

Had the Greek Cypriots known more about the Ottoman history of Cyprus, they would perhaps join the Ledra Street demonstrations in bigger numbers. As it has been noted by many historians (Hadjianastasis, Reference Hadjianastasis2009; Michael, Reference Michael, Gavriel and Kappler2009; Hadjikiriakos, Reference Hadjikyriacou2023), the Ottoman history of Cyprus is a blind spot in both history teaching at Greek Cypriot schools and official historiography, as it is exhausted in the stereotype of “300 years of dark slavery” aligned with the ethnocentric narrative of Greeks of Cyprus who have to face the aggression of barbaric Turks throughout time immemorial (Papadakis, Reference Papadakis2008).

In bicommunal circles in 2020 there was a lot of discussion about the Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades losing his focus on the effort to reunite Cyprus due to both Russian influence and his involvement in the ‘golden passport programme’, through the law office carrying his name in Limassol and run by close family members (Drousiotis, Reference Drousiotis2020, Reference Drousiotis2021, Reference Drousiotis2022). Officially titled ‘the Cyprus Investment Programme’, the passport programme was a citizenship-by-investment scheme that was highly criticised by the European Union (EU). It produced the highest number of per-capita investment citizenship cases globally (Rakopoulos, Reference Rakopoulos2023), making millions for a network of Greek Cypriot lawyers, politicians and real estate agents who served this industry in the south of the divide. According to Rakopoulos (Reference Rakopoulos2023), because of this investment policy and its associated returns, the programme was particularly popular, and about 6,000 rich people (mostly Russian oligarchs) had become citizens since 2013 through it by buying property on the island in excess of 2.5 million euros per investor. Most investment was in real estate in Limassol whose skyline recently has been transformed by newly built skyscrapers. Due to this real estate bubble in Limassol most Cypriots can no longer build a new house or even rent because of astronomic land and rent prices.

Just a few months after the Ledra Street incidents, in August and October 2020, Al Jazeera published a series of investigative journalism pieces under the title ‘The Cyprus Papers’,Footnote ¹ naming beneficiaries related to the golden passport programme of the Republic of Cyprus, which included convicted criminals or people awaiting trial in their home countries. Due to the reactions from the revealed scandal related to a member of parliament and the speaker of parliament and threats of sanctions from the EU, the programme was discontinued in November 2020. The Cypriot president said this was his worst experience in a political career spanning 40 years but did not admit to any corruption criticism and did not resign from office until the end of his term in February 2023.

In the meantime, Turkey intervened in the Turkish Cypriot elections in October 2020 and managed to get the nationalist leader Ersin Tatar elected. Tatar was involved before in the Polly Peck scandal in the United KingdomFootnote ² when Asil Nadir was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was found guilty of stealing £29 million from his company Polly Peck during the 1980s. Tatar denied any corruption criticisms after he was elected. Together with Turkey, Tatar changed their policy to supporting a two-state solution in Cyprus, calling the BBF model supported by the UN and the Security Council resolutions and the EU ‘dead’. Such hardening of positions went hand in hand with renewed tensions in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey that escalated after the Crans Montana failure. These were tensions over territorial and airspace claims in and over the Aegean Sea. Despite being NATO allies, Greece and Turkey have been at odds on maritime issues concerning the Aegean Sea since the 1970s, but the more recent contestation included delimitation of the EEZ in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the summer of 2022, the two countries came to the brink of a full-blown naval and air military confrontation.

After the change of leadership in the Greek Cypriot community in February 2023 and elections in Greece and Turkey in the same year, there is a new dynamic emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean which seems to be related to an effort by the USA and the EU to lessen Russian influence in the Eastern Mediterannean and to bring back stability in the Eastern Mediterranean, especially since 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. With this war ongoing, the last thing western powers would obviously like to see is war between two NATO countries.

In early 2024, both leaders in Cyprus requested a joint meeting with the UN Secretary General who also appointed Ms. María Angela Holguín Cuéllar of Colombia as his Personal Envoy on Cyprus to assume the good offices role on his behalf to search for common ground on the way forward and to advise him on the Cyprus issue. By the end of 2024, an agreement has been reached between the two leaders to attempt opening new checkpoints and also to hold a multiparty meeting with guarantor powers sometime in 2025.

It is thus hoped that another opportunity might be on the horizon to resolve the Cyprus problem and once again the international community will try to understand what the Cypriots want in terms of the future of their island. Do they want reunification of Cyprus or its partition? Do they still support the BFF model? If yes, what is the specific content of BBF that could be accepted in referendums in the two communities so that the peace package would gain legitimacy with the people? These pertinent questions come 60 years after intercommunal strife in 1964 and 50 years after the complete geographical division of Cyprus in 1974. Last year also marks 20 years since Cyprus joined the EU in 2004 with the EU aquis suspended in the north of Cyprus pending a solution of the Cyprus problem, and about the same time since opening of checkpoints in 2003.

The protests depicted on the cover of the book were the manifestation of the joint collective action by members of both communities, and it is an important case of internal ideological conflict over co-operation across the dividing line in Cyprus. This subtype of collective action is understudied in the field of collective action where the main interest is collective action defined by social psychologists as any action that individuals undertake as psychological group members, and with the subjective goal to improve their group’s condition (Van Zomeren, Reference Van Zomeren2013). Even analyses of protracted or intractable conflicts (Bar-Tal, Reference Bar-Tal2023) usually paint a homogeneous picture of two conflicting ethnic groups discussing their collective memory (Bar-Tal, Reference Bar-Tal2014) and ethos of conflict (Bar-Tal, Reference Bar-Tal2023) as a system of beliefs that represents the ethnic group as a whole, masking the heterogeneity within ethnic groups on how they represent the conflict and the out-group(s) of that conflict (Psaltis, Reference Psaltis2016). It is our firm belief that any understanding of the process of conflict transformation of an ethnic conflict and change needs to delve deeper into issues of heterogeneity (Psaltis, Reference Psaltis2012b; Duveen, Reference Duveen, Valsiner and Rosa2007) and understand change from one position in the representational field to another. Geopolitical analyses of conflicts and the realist school of international relations homogenise this picture even more by treating the nation state and its national interests as the unit of analysis where the public and the people lose any agency to resist what is defined by the elites as the national interest (Trimikliniotis, Reference Trimikliniotis, Latham, Murray, von Bargen and Kingsmith2020), ending up ossifying the conflict itself. Given that ethnic conflicts are usually resolved by a peace deal or agreement legitimised by popular vote on a peace plan through referendums (Loizides, Reference Loizides2014), understanding this heterogeneity within each of the conflicting groups in order to design or institutionalise a peace plan acceptable by both sides of the conflict is actually not a luxury but a necessity (see Loizides et al., Reference Loizides, Psaltis, Morgan-Jones, Sudulich, Popp and Baykiz2022). Similar previous efforts to chart the views of the the two communities in Cyprus through polling were valuable in helping the UN and negotiators to formulate policy proposals (Lordos, Reference Lordos, Diez and Tocci2009; Sozen et al., 2010) but did not offer an integrative theoretical framework to make sense of their data from a social, developmental or historical perspective. It is our contention in this book that in understanding conflict and change an integrative and interdisciplinary social developmental psychology that takes historical time seriously into account can contribute a lot in this effort.

The joint protests that occurred at the Ledras checkpoint on 7 March 2020 in this sense represented a change of mentality that was being prepared for since the openings of a checkpoint between the divided island at that very spot in 2008 and in the first opening of the checkpoints in 2003. While the ethnic conflict of 1963–1964 and the war of 1974 in Cyprus has had lasting consequences in the minds of people (e.g., how they see the other community, their representations and attitudes about the past, present and future of Cyprus), 17 years of contact had led to profound transformations and opened up new possibilities of conflict transformation that people were witnessing during the events depicted on the cover of the book.

The ex-minister of education in Cyprus, Andreas Demetriou, who is a professor of developmental psychology, along with historian Antonis Liakos and political scientist Niyazi Kizilyürek (Demetriou et al., Reference Demetriou, Liakos and Kizilyürek2021), recently proposed in the Journal of Intelligence a developmental/historical theory which propounds an educational programme ‘for raising Mandelas’. They argue that no theory of intelligence or intellectual development suffices to generate solutions for serious social or political problems, and we need to focus our attention on the study of how we can cultivate wisdom. They propose that to be useful for this sake, any theory would have to be much broader, accounting for individual and social development on several fronts, such as (1) individual mental development and (2) the contribution of individual development to the functioning of the social groups and institutions at various levels, such as family, city, nation, and humanity, increasingly distancing from an individual’s own life. They note that currently, no comprehensive theory exists that would do justice to these interactions. We fully agree with their claims, and we see this book and the proposal for a genetic social psychology as a contribution in this direction. However, to fully comprehend this shift, a new form of psychological theory is needed premised on a social relational epistemology. In the place of an individualist epistemology focused on abstract and timeless central processing mechanisms, we must start from people embedded in complex social relationships and history, recognising the microgenetic processes of communication and dialogue as the motor for ontogenetic and sociogenetic change.

Our approach highlights the nature and conditions of social and psychological change starting from the study of microgenetic processes. Moreover, change must be understood as occurring at interrelated levels of analysis, namely interpersonal interaction (microgenesis), a person’s life course (ontogenesis) and society at large in historical time (sociogenesis). At each level, people are shaped by a history of interactions and ideas accumulated up to that point but also use that history to set goals for the future. Thus, psychology should study not only people’s current beliefs and behaviours but also the possibilities they strive for. In this book, the Cyprus conflict will serve as a rich case study to develop a broader theoretical framework that can be used to understand the processes of change and conflict transformation in other cases. Furthermore, we believe this wider approach is better equipped to tackle other major issues of our day.

Transformation of Conflict and the Path to Reconciliation and Institution Building

The shift in peace and conflict studies towards a focus on ‘conflict transformation’ rather than solely on ‘conflict resolution’ represents a significant and positive development (Galtung & Tschudi, 200Reference Galtung, Tschudi, Christie, Wagner and Winter1; Lederach, Reference Lederach1997). This evolution, as noted by scholars such as Kelman (Reference Kelman, Nadler, Malloy and Fisher2008), facilitates a deeper comprehension of the complexities surrounding conflicts, emphasising a more holistic approach compared to the somewhat narrower scope of conflict resolution. Conflict transformation is distinguished by its comprehensive focus not only on ceasing direct violence but also on fostering a sustained commitment to positive peace. This includes addressing structural issues such as inequality, social exclusion and exploitation, as well as cultural violence manifested through prejudices, distrust and perceived threats. Essentially, conflict transformation seeks to modify the underlying systems, structures and relationships that perpetuate violence and injustice.

Theoretical frameworks that extend beyond mere conflict management and resolution underscore the necessity of understanding the mechanisms that facilitate the transformation of conflict from destructive expressions to constructive engagements. These models view conflict as an inherent aspect of daily life, which should be navigated through dialogue, creativity and peaceful means. According to Constantinou (Reference Constantinou, Psaltis, Gillespie and Perret-Clermont2015), conflict resolution and transformation are complementary, with the latter often serving as a precursor to effective resolution, particularly in prolonged conflicts.

Central to both conflict resolution and transformation is the concept of reconciliation (Nadler & Shabel, Reference Nadler and Shnabel2015), which is pivotal both as a process and as an outcome. Reconciliation reduces the likelihood of violent conflict in scenarios marked by structural inequalities, political instability or transitional periods. It also enhances the durability of peace agreements. Recent contributions from social psychology have been instrumental in enriching our understanding of reconciliation. Kelman (Reference Kelman2005, Reference Kelman, Nadler, Malloy and Fisher2008) and others have highlighted the importance of trust in achieving a peace settlement that addresses justice and inequality, thereby ensuring its sustainability.

The emotional dynamics of intergroup reconciliation have been conceptualised as processes of emotion regulation (Čehajić-Clancy et al., Reference Čehajić-Clancy, Goldenberg, Gross and Halperin2016) involving a shift towards positive affective states towards former adversaries. This perspective integrates insights from the fields of emotion regulation and intergroup reconciliation, suggesting the modulation of emotions such as hatred, anger, guilt, hope and empathy to facilitate profound psychological transformations. These include changes in beliefs, emotions, identities and behavioural intentions, grounded in theories like the Intergroup Emotions Theory (Smith, Reference Smith, Mackie and Hamilton1993) or Integrated Threat Theory (Stephan et al., Reference Stephan, Ybarra, Rios Morrison and Nelson2009).

Critiques have emerged, arguing that viewing reconciliation merely as emotional regulation oversimplifies the process (Shnabel & Ulrich, Reference Shnabel and Ullrich2016; Volhard & Twali, Reference Vollhardt and Twali2016), neglecting the necessity for structural and societal changes. This critique aligns with the broader discourse on conflict transformation, which encompasses both societal and individual dimensions of change. From the perspective of social representations, reconciliation involves a shift from a position in the representational field of mistrust and prejudice to one of trust, understanding and reduced threats, facilitated by meaningful intergroup contact and supported by legal and societal structures (Psaltis, Reference Psaltis, Marková and Gillespie2012a).

Theories focusing on transformative processes view social and national identities as socially constructed, aligning with recent advances in social and developmental psychology. These theories advocate for understanding human and societal change as transformations in social relations, offering a broader perspective than traditional social identity theory, which focuses primarily on categorisation processes. This approach underscores the importance of the transformation of historical master narratives of conflict and social representations (Nasie et al., Reference Nasie, Bar-Tal, Pliskin, Nahhas and Haperin2014; Hilton & Liu, 2017; Psaltis et al., Reference Psaltis, Carretero and Čehajić-Clancy2017) in shaping intergroup relations, highlighting the potential for in-depth societal transformation.

In the case of Cyprus, where an ethno-political conflict of contested sovereignty and power struggle between the two communities (Kızılyürek, Reference Kızılyürek2019) turned into a territorial conflict, ethnic cleansing and violation of international law, sustainable peace can only be achieved by reaching an agreement that safeguards some preconditions that follow the basic principles of the conflict transformation approach: (1) it is supported by the international community, international law and UN resolutions; (2) it satisfies the basic needs and thus accepted by both communities of Cyprus; (3) it entails a compromise for both communities so that no one community will feel they lost at the expense of the other; and (4) it resolves historical structural inequalities and injustices.

As it will become clear from the findings presented in the first part of the book, the only type of solution that satisfies these preconditions in the case of Cyprus is Bizonal Bicommunal Federation (henceforth BBF), since it was the type of solution agreed by the leaders of the two communities in the high-level agreements since 1977, it is the type of solution supported by numerous UN Security Council resolutions, and, as we will see, it is a solution that can be accepted by a majority of voters in both communities.

From the perspective of conflict transformation, there is therefore a clear route to be followed: there needs to be a cultivation of a reconciliation ethos (Shnabel & Ulrich, Reference Shnabel and Ullrich2016) in large parts of both communities of Cyprus that will make possible the transformation of co-operative ingroup norms into the setting up of the institution of a federal state. In this process some key outcomes are of crucial importance: the reduction of prejudice in both communities of Cyprus (Hunsu & Lajunen, Reference Husnu and Lajunen2015; Husnu et al., Reference Husnu, Mertan and Cicek2018; Yucel & Psaltis, Reference Yucel and Psaltis2020a), the cultivation of trust (Kende et al., Reference Kende, Psaltis, Reiter, Fousiani, Cakal and Green2022; McKeown & Psaltis, Reference McKeown and Psaltis2017), transformation of collective identities (Psaltis & Cakal, Reference Psaltis, Cakal, McKeown, Haji and Ferguson2016), acceptance of renewed cohabitation (Yucel & Psaltis, Reference Yucel and Psaltis2020b), reconciliation (Trimikliniotis, Reference Trimikliniotis2023) and acceptance of BBF itself (Psaltis et al., Reference Psaltis, Cakal, Loizides and Kuşçu Bonnenfant2020; Loizides et al., Reference Loizides, Psaltis, Morgan-Jones, Sudulich, Popp and Baykiz2022) as a model of governance. In this process the reflection, deconstruction and transformation of master narratives of conflict and representations of the past in Cyprus are key (Makriyianni & Psaltis, Reference Makriyianni and Psaltis2007; Papadakis, Reference Papadakis2008; Psaltis et al., Reference Makriyianni, Psaltis, Latif, Erdmann and Hasberg2011; Klerides & Zembylas, Reference Klerides and Zembylas2017). In this book we will propose a multilevel framework to understand processes of change as conflict transformation at different timescales that integrates the most recent findings from the field of intergroup relations in not only social and political psychology but also developmental psychology and history.

Understanding Change: The Need for an Integrative Framework

Most of social psychology today remains acontextual and ahistorical, and as the late Gerard Duveen of the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at Cambridge University always used to say, ‘We generally lack good theories of change in the social sciences.’ His striving for understanding change inspired both editors of this volume, as he supervised both of our PhDs. He had a vision of creating an integrative social-developmental psychology that he called genetic social psychology. Social and developmental psychology have typically been understood as two separate subdisciplines – with their own theories, methods and canonical studies – that only occasionally overlap. Despite their centrality, there have been few attempts in recent decades to articulate a broader integration of the two.

This integration would require an expansive interdisciplinary vision that takes account of different levels of analysis (from individual to societal) and their relationships to each other. Moreover, it will have to explore how the fundamental concepts of conflict and change play out on different levels and timescales. This book aims to provide a vision for integration on the foundations of earlier concepts of development (or genesis) in philosophy, history, social and developmental psychology, and their renewal to meet the big challenges of the 21st century and our living in times of accelerated historical change after the 1950s (McNeill & Engelke, Reference McNeill and Engelke2016) that is not only affecting the survival of the human species in the Anthropocene through climate change but also increasing inequalities, global injustices and intergroup conflict, bringing back the spectre of a new cold war, divisions of East and West, North and South, and eventually the real threat of nuclear extinction.

With China as the new challenger of US financial and military world dominance, the centre of financial gravity of the world is once again turning towards the eastern border of the EU, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. But this time it seems the international antagonisms are not around trade routes described by the Annales historian Fernand Braudel (Reference Braudel1949) in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, but around energy routes, pipelines of hydrocarbons (Faustmann & Sözen, Reference Faustmann and Sözen2021; Sozen, 2023) and electricity, posing important questions about the ability of states around the Mediterranean to overcome their historical divisions, ‘banal imperialism’ (Constantinou, Reference Constantinou2021) and animosities to co-operate in finding win–win solutions while at the same time posing important questions about sustainability and clean energy alternatives in these troubled times of climatic change.

Fernard Braudel was not only successful in bringing to global attention the land–sea continuity of the Mediterranean as a key geography for the development of early capitalism in the second half of the sixteenth century. He also inspired generations of first-rate Cypriot diaspora historians (Hadjikyriacou, Reference Hadjikyriacou2023; Kitromilides, Reference Kitromilides2019; Zanou, Reference Zanou2018) to reconceptualise the Mediterranean as a fluid space of both antagonism and co-operation and add their voices to historians who are not afraid to deconstruct national myths and are interested in promoting co-operation in our area (Hadjidimitriou, Reference Hadjidemetriou2021; Katsikas, Reference Katsikas2021; Ktoris, Reference Ktoris2013; Kızılyürek, Reference Kızılyürek2019; Pavlou, Reference Pavlou2015; Perikleous, Reference Perikleous2010; Varnava, Reference Varnava2024). Moreover, Braudel’s discussion of the multiplicity of timescales and promotion of interdisciplinary thinking are key in any serious attempt to approach issues of historical change. Braudel distinguishes the structures of La longue durée (The Long Duration), Conjuctures and Events. Despite these useful distinctions, Braudel’s approach can be criticised on at least two fronts: first, his downplaying of human agency and importance of psychology in his interdisciplinary approach; and second, and perhaps more fundamentally considering the work of McNeill and Engelke (Reference McNeill and Engelke2016) on accelerated historical change, that his tripartite distinction might no longer be relevant in the 21st century of fast ecological changes, internet communication and globalization.

It seems like the first problem is due to the disciplines of psychology and history traditionally being strange bedfellows. This is in spite of late 19th-century arguments for modelling psychology on history, as Wilhelm Dilthey had done and even partially Wilhelm Wundt in his Völkspsychologie. In an insightful discussion between social psychologists and historians in an edited volume by Tileagă and Byford (Reference Tileagă and Byford2014) entitled Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, it was made clear that there exists a historical divide between psychology and history. The editors note that despite sharing a common interest in understanding human behaviour and societal phenomena, the two disciplines have often operated in isolation, each with its distinct methodologies, theoretical frameworks and epistemological underpinnings. This separation has led to a lack of substantive dialogue and collaboration between these disciplines.

Methodologically, psychology’s reliance on empirical, often experimental methods contrasts with history’s focus on narrative and interpretive analysis of past events. This methodological divergence has been a significant barrier to interdisciplinary work. As we show in this volume, the first barrier can be overcome through the application of mixed methods. There is also a difference in temporal focus. Historians typically engage with long-term processes and changes over extended periods, while psychologists often concentrate on immediate or short-term human behaviours and mental processes. This difference in temporal scales can make it challenging to integrate insights from the two fields. We believe that historical timescales like the ones proposed by Braudel and the ones that we will propose in our approach as microgenesis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis can be both overlapping and complementary. But maybe even more important in any analysis of conflict and change is the question of what changes, how (through which mechanisms) and the quality or depth of that change.

For example, Moghaddam (Reference Moghaddam, Wagoner, Bresco de Luna and Glavenau2018) recently discussed transitions from dictatorships or totalitarian regimes to democracies observing that historically there are actually only a few rare successful instances of such transitions to what he calls ‘actualised democracies’. He defines actualised democracies as a democracy where there is full, informed, equal participation in wide aspects of political, economic and cultural decision-making independent of financial investment and resources. He makes the distinction between first-, second- and third-order societal change. First-order change takes place without altering either the formal law or the informal normative system that justifies unequal treatment on the basis of group membership. Second-order change involves change in formal law to make illegal unequal treatment on the basis of group membership, but the informal normative system continues to allow unequal treatment on the basis of group membership. Third-order change involves a transformation of both the formal and informal systems: it is a change of systems, from one system to another, rather than a change only within a system.

The editors and contributors in the Tileagă and Byford (Reference Tileagă and Byford2014) volume discuss fields of fruitful interdisciplinary exchange between history and psychology, such as the study of collective memory, stereotypes, prejudice, identity formation and social representations, where insights from both disciplines can mutually enrich understanding. These examples demonstrate how interdisciplinary research can lead to more comprehensive and nuanced perspectives. In this book we aim to extend this discussion through the case study of divided Cyprus and historical transformation of social representations of each community about the other community, prejudice, trust and the potential of renewed cohabitation as well as representations of the past in the last 20 years. Perhaps more ambitiously, we would like to outline the programmatic contours of a once and future discipline that integrates social and developmental psychology in the study of different timescales and different quality of change that our late supervisor Gerard Duveen called genetic social psychology. This approach is a kind of history from below that resonates with the position about the role of history proposed by Duveen’s favourite author, Walter Benjamin.

Such an approach was applied in the historical work of E. P. Thompson (Reference Thompson1974) in his study of the labour class in the United Kingdom, and in Cyprus in the study of the labor class in the transition from the Ottoman to the British period by the late historian Rolandos Katsianounis (Reference Katsiaounis1996). The present book will play a similar function in giving voice to laypeople from the two communities beyond the elite views or the views of some politicians in Cyprus that might have their own agendas, individualist considerations of becoming billionaires or perceptions about the Cyprus problem. At the end of the day we are interested in the views of the people that will be voting in a referendum in both communities if we ever get to an agreed package by the leaders of the two communities. This is the voice that on various occasions has been suppressed, hijackedFootnote ³ or distorted by the elites and media conglomerates in Cyprus with an anti-federalist agenda (Avraamidou & Psaltis, Reference Loizides, Psaltis, Morgan-Jones, Sudulich, Popp and Baykiz2022).

The social developmental theoretical framework advanced in this book offers valuable insights to the Progressive Psychology book series it belongs to, as it shares with it some key concerns such as ending discrimination and prejudice, combating the psychological consequences of interethnic conflict, protecting children in conflict zones, moving societies to more openness and consolidating and deepening democracy. It avoids the pitfalls of cultural relativism as it builds up its unit of analysis from deep, universal central processes of an epistemological triad of subject–object–other and the changing socially constructed social relational configurations through well-defined and empirically validated processes of changing social representations in human groups and communities in specific sociocultural and historical settings. This approach makes possible finding oneself in history as it relates past, present and future, giving agency not only to the historical subjects under study but also to the researchers doing the study. In this way the approach developed here aligns with the ‘social psychology of the world making’ model that we have recently proposed (Power et al., Reference Power, Zittoun, Akkerman, Wagoner, Cabra and Cornish2023). Any representation of the past not only refers to the past but also shapes the present and imagines the future, as we are positioned actors in research and not just objects.

Why Cyprus as a starting point? Cyprus is a small island where one can know more about the internal dynamics and policymaking even at the highest echelons of power. Some say nothing stays secret in Cyprus. Indeed, the owner of one of the biggest nationalist media conglomerates (Hadjicostis, Reference Hadjikostis2023), in a book where he reveals discussions he had with previous presidents of the Republic of Cyprus, reveals that Anastasiades was indeed seriously thinking about a two-state solution in Cyprus at some point. Was he in alignment or complete disagreement on his judgement in relation to what the Greek Cypriot voters wanted? The findings reported in this book will not only answer this question by showing the big discrepancy between his elite ideas and the public but also identify moments in his own governance when efforts for bottom-up change, grassroots initiatives, everyday diplomacy (Constantinou, Reference Constantinou, Psaltis, Gillespie and Perret-Clermont2015) and track II diplomacy met top-down decisions by his leadership that made a significant positive impact, like the establishment of the Bi-communal Technical Committee of Education or the programme Imagine.

The geographical position of Cyprus also allows it to be a test case of influences at the international and geopolitical levels of superpowers of the world. In terms of a case of conflict transformation, it is also a middle case between an active conflict (e.g., Israel) and a post–peace accord case (e.g., Northern Ireland, Colombia), and in that sense there are dynamics that could either take Cyprus forward or turn it back whilst helping to understand both ends of the spectrum. We will thus be using Cyprus as an illustrative example to highlight broader concepts and issues important to social and developmental theory in the real world. We see the proposal of genetic social psychology as being complementary to other recent efforts by researchers to synthesise findings from cultural evolution, religion studies, economics, anthropology and psychology (Henrich, Reference Henrich2015, Reference Henrich2020) in our understanding of changes in humanity. Data from Cyprus will further contribute to reducing dependence of our theories built almost exclusively from Western-educated industrial rich democracies (WEIRD) societies (Henrich, Reference Henrich2020).

Preview of the Book

Part I of the book is structured in five chapters written by Charis Psaltis. In Chapter 1 he discusses the philosophical and theoretical foundations of genetic social psychology. He returns to the work of sociologist Lucien Goldmann to broaden the theoretical and methodological purview of genetic social psychology as originally proposed by Gerard Duveen. In Chapter 2 he explores the ontogenesis of prejudice using the framework outlined in Chapter 1. This leads into Chapter 3 on sociogenetic changes, highlighting the role of values in society and through time. In Chapter 4, he applies the broader framework specifically to the Cyprus issue, analysing the microgenesis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis of the conflict, especially how ‘otherness’ is conceived by both communities. Special emphasis is made on understanding how children in the two communities of Cyprus become politically socialised into a protracted conflict of a deeply divided society through the educational system. Given his particular interest in ontogenetic changes, he reviews work covering childhood, adolescence and adulthood in relation to the development of prejudice and representations of the Cyprus problem. In Chapter 5, he discusses the methodology of articulation of microgenetic, ontogenetic and sociogenetic processes and offers a qualitative analysis of an autobiographical account of his changing representations of the Cyprus problem and the other community as well as a quantitative way of disentangling age, period and cohort effects.

Part II of the book contains several commentaries and extensions on the integrative approach developed in Part I. In Chapter 6 Ivana Marková revisits the epistemological foundations of some of the ancestors of genetic social psychology and particularly the common threads binding these approaches together, which are the concepts of the dialectics of genesis and structure, part–whole relations, and temporality. Marková discusses the way these common threads were linked with the fundamental epistemological questions that had already preoccupied philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. In her commentary she suggests that while the questions about the nature of knowledge bind these philosophers together, their proposed answers surpass their common links because, depending on their epistemological presuppositions, their answers are based on diverse concepts concerning the nature of knowledge. Consequently, these answers were reflected in different ways in the contributions of Piaget, Goldmann, Moscovici and Duveen in their studies of the dialectics of genesis and structure.

In his commentary in Chapter 7 Alex Gillespie claims that addressing the human-made problems of the 21st century requires rethinking the aims of social and developmental psychology. It requires scholarship that seeks not merely to describe how humans develop but one that aims to intervene in how humans develop. More fundamentally, it requires resisting the widespread idea that there are causes of human behaviour (socialisation, history, culture) that push us mechanically from the past into the future and instead focus on humans as world-makers. Either by accepting the status quo or resisting it, humans must take responsibility for the world of tomorrow. The question for social psychology is not what causes human behaviour or even how human behaviour changes and develops, but rather what type of people we want to be. Such a pragmatic and genetic social and developmental psychology would be doubly genetic: it is not only about change but also about enabling humans to critically reflect on and collectively guide these changes. Specifically, it needs to critically challenge and expand the possible, ensure that world-making tools are fairly distributed, and create theories of human behaviour that encourage a richer humanity.

In Chapter 8 Tania Zittoun discusses what she calls ‘the ambitious project of a genetic social psychology’ that proposes to integrate various strands of psychology around a case study, along the tripartite concepts of sociogenesis, microgenesis and ontoegenesis. In her commentary she retraces three variations of the tripartite model (microgensis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis) and highlights conceptual ambiguities they maintain around the issues of affects and their model of the subject. She also indicates how her own work in sociocultural psychology has developed in parallel to the genetic social psychology proposed, and how both approaches seem to concur on the importance of studying complex case studies. Third, drawing on the two previous points, she emphasises the role of affects in the case study reported in the first part of the book, and she argues that it needs an adequate model of the person. She concludes by proposing that a better integration of the two lines of theorisation may lead us to a richer theory of human development.

In Chapter 9 Christina Alexopoulos proposes some theoretical bridges between psychoanalysis and genetic social psychology. She shows how psychoanalysis deals with individual and collective trauma, in relation to the unconscious reproduction of what has caused a psychic breakthrough for the subject and the group, with each aftermath re-semantising painful past experiences. Archaic fears and defence mechanisms are common to everyone before giving way to more evolved modes of functioning. Confrontation with major traumatic experiences can undo the symbolic capacities acquired during human development and plunge the subject and the group into archaic modes of functioning: projection of the bad object outside the group, splitting between an all-good self-image and an all-bad image of the other, denial of the suffering of the outside group. This regressive logic traps the actors in a victimisation likely to lead to further violence or to maintain a climate of permanent threat. She shows that working on the dual recognition of trauma means that the experiences are not hidden; that the point of view of the other, whether inside or outside the group, is integrated; and that a narrative of the past that leaves room for internal and external polyphony is passed on to future generations. This leads to the expression of internal conflict within oneself and one’s community, rejecting a monolithic vision of identity and history.

In Chapter 10 Gordon Sammut proposes that divergent perspectives are typically rooted in contrasting worldviews which, in their own right, help to establish a certain social order and structure social relations in determined ways. Worldviews not only grant meaning to individual existence but also help communities to pursue collective goals that advance their members’ mutual interests. In their turn, individuals establish communities and participate in collective actions in pursuit of their own interests. In his commentary he argues that human action is characteristically self-interested and oriented towards social relations at the service of collective projects. These collective projects are legitimated by common sense that grants meaning to social objects and events. Processes of social re-presentation serve to fashion objectifications that do not challenge a community’s underlying project. In this way, overcoming conflict requires unpacking contrasting action strategies in terms of projects supported by logical perspectives – that is, perspectives that make sense to the individuals involved. He also proposes an argumentation analysis protocol that serves to identify convergent claims between groups with contested visions, thus providing the building blocks for mutually satisfactory solutions revealing targets for social representation transformative interventions.

In Chapter 11 Cathy Nicholson argues that the concern of genetic social psychology is to understand the possibilities for change through different kinds of contact between members of groups in protracted conflicts. This is pursued through an interacting multilayer lens that takes the individual self as a unit, set within a particular intrapersonal, intergroup and societal ideological context. The role of asymmetry is central to the contact hypothesis, yet often ignored, in determining how each group perceives the other and acts on that contact whether through planned or random meetings resulting in positive, negative or ambiguous outcomes. Her own work on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict stands at the foundation for her chapter, using empirical findings from a range of settings to discuss the role of intergroup prejudice affecting contact and how this might usefully map onto the processes of microgenesis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis of social representations of the conflict. This conflict situation is compared and contrasted with the one described by Psaltis (this volume) to arrive at a general model of intergroup conflict and contact within the framework of genetic social psychology.

In Chapter 12 Angela Bermudez offers an autobiographical narrative relating to her trajectory and experience of working in various conflict and post-conflict settings which culminates in a proposition of how to study from a critical stance the normalisation of violence in historical narratives and texbooks. She also makes some linkages with genetic social psychology proposed in this book.

In Chapter 13 Alicia Barreiro, Antonio Castorina and Mario Carretero return to the work of Doise (Reference Doise1986) and his four levels of analysis to discuss the challenge of a dialectical articulation between the individual and society. In their commentary they discuss different ways in which this tension was translated into research in genetic social psychology as well as present their own variant of revised genetic psychology, making links with history teaching and representations of the past. They also touch on some fundamental epistemological issues of interdisciplinarity and the call for a clarification of the ontological and epistemological commitments of genetic social psychology.

In the Conclusion Psaltis answers with a rejoinder to the various commentaries and discusses the relevance of his work for Cyprus and other post-conflict settings.