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A "global special issue" on poverty brought together 9 international psychology journals during 2010 through 2013. The purpose was to highlight psychology's contribution toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals are rooted in the "capabilities approach" and highlight the importance of fostering environments that support 3 core domains: health, basic education, and income. Here, we analyze what the global special issue contributed. As a whole the global special issue provided an account of "how" psychology engages with poverty and poverty reduction. First, the global special issue, more than other research on poverty, was focused on lower-and middle-income settings. Second, while the content of the articles could be coded into 3 specific domains (health/well-being, education/development, and society/work), the vast majority of the articles straddled more than 1 category. Third, the contents of the global special issue could be organized in terms of the type of contribution: that is, practicality, theory, description, and advocacy. We highlight the importance of addressing wider situational and sociopolitical structures that constrain capability and potential, without losing sight of the person. Psychology might (a) concentrate resources on finding out what actually works to enable poverty reduction; and (b) apply what we know to ensure that research on poverty reduction is more informative and compelling to community stakeholders, organizations, and policymakers. Such an "implementation science" could advance poverty reduction and human development.

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T his article examines fractures in the social representations of a contested peace agreement in the longstanding territorial conflict of Mindanao. We compared representational structures and discourses about the peace talks among Muslims and Christians. Study One used an open-ended survey of 420 Christians and Muslims from two Mindanao cities identified with different Islamised tribes, and employed the hierarchical evocation method to provide representational structures of the peace agreement. Study Two contrasted discourses about the Memorandum of Agreement between two Muslim liberation fronts identified with separate Islamised tribes in Mindanao. Findings show unified Christians' social representations about the peace agreement. However, Muslims' social representations diverge along the faultlines of the Islamised ethnic groups. Findings are examined in the light of ethnopolitical divides that emerge among apparently united nonmigrant groups, as peace agreements address territorial solutions. Research results are likewise discussed in relation to other tribally contoured social landscapes that carry hidden, yet fractured ethnic narratives embedded in a larger war storyline.Keywords: Mindanao, territorial conflict, ethnic identities, peace talks, social representations, hierarchical evocation methodThe southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines has been the politico-military arena of a longstanding territorial conflict (Bertrand, 2000;Buendia, 2005) often described as a Muslim-Christian clash (Milligan, 2001;Tan, 2000). However, Mindanao is not only the Philippine hotbed of territorial conflict, it is also a region in which several peace initiatives have taken place. authority over these defined territories. The public announcement of the MOA triggered a series of peaceful and armed protests among Christians, and counter-protests among Moro-associated forces. The Supreme Court eventually junked the peace agreement, and the Philippine president fired the government peace panel that she herself had constituted.This recent peace fiasco likewise called attention to divisions among Muslims. With this recent unsuccessful attempt to establish peace in Mindanao, we investigated the nature of the psychological fractures within the Muslim front. We looked at how different Islamised groups in Mindanao made sense of the Memorandum of Agreement. However, as social psychologists who are Christians, we reflexively acknowledge our perceptive limitations as we attempted to understand political meanings held by two different Islamised tribes in what has been labelled a Muslim-Christian conflict. We viewed our research question through the lens of social representations theory, because this theory lends itself well to illuminating the subjective landscape of social conflict.

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