Income inequality undermines societies: the more inequality, the more health problems, social tensions, and the lower social mobility, trust, life expectancy. Given people’s tendency to legitimate existing social arrangements, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) argues that ambivalence—perceiving many groups as either warm or competent, but not both—may help maintain socio-economic disparities. The association between stereotype ambivalence and income inequality in 37 cross-national samples from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa investigates how groups’ overall warmth-competence, status-competence, and competition-warmth correlations vary across societies, and whether these variations associate with income inequality (Gini index). More unequal societies report more ambivalent stereotypes, while more equal ones dislike competitive groups and do not necessarily respect them as competent. Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.

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This article reviews the development of interactive problem solving as an unofficial approach to the resolution of international conflicts, especially as we have applied it to the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. The article describes the concept of the continuing workshop, which represents our latest attempt to maximize the political impact of interactive problem solving. After presenting the goals, terms of reference, and ground rules of such workshops, the paper examines their potential contribution to the larger process of conflict resolution. The principles of the continuing workshop have been applied in a series of meetings between high‐ranking Israeli and Palestinian participants. The paper discusses some of the practical issues confronted in this effort, such as preparation, selection of participants, and the third‐party role; and assesses the contribution of this continuing workshop to transforming the relationship between the two societies in conflict.

This article has 3 main goals. First, it aims to present a conceptualization of reconciliation in national conflict, distinguishing reconciliation from 2 other processes defined in the conflict resolution literature-conflict settlement and conflict resolution-and examining the requirements of reconciliation in the context of power relations and identity-based conflicts. Second, it discusses factors that influence reconciliation and examines patterns of historical reconciliation and the role of power relations and identity in these patterns. Third, it applies the conceptualization presented in the first 2 parts to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Reconciliation is a relatively new term in the conflict resolution literature. The new currency of the term and its increasing application are due, in large part, to major international developments that brought issues of justice, historical truth, and reckoning with history to the core of social agendas in many countries and increased international awareness of the importance of these issues for resolving ethnonational conflict. This has been the case, for example, in countries that witnessed transitions from authoritarian regimes involved in gross human rights violations against their own citizens to fledgling democratic regimes in which issues of what was termed transitional justice (Crocker, 1999) became central (e.g., El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, the Philippines, and countries in the Eastern European bloc). Similarly, some democratic countries began examining past evils such as genocide of native populations, slavery, and war crimes (e.g., United States, Australia, and Japan). Other countries began examining why and how segments of their population collaborated with occupiers, or why they failed to protest genocidal policies

This article examines the perception of power, threat, and conflict intensity in an asymmetric intergroup conflict. About 900 Arab and 900 Jewish high school and university students in Israel were surveyed on their sense of threat and security, the intensity of the conflict between their communities, and power relations between Arabs and Jews who both are citizens of Israel. Scales were developed to measure all three concepts in that setting. Factor analysis of the power scale shows that the two groups distinguish between two dimensions of power. Both sides agree that the Jewish population asymmetrically controls more institutional power and to a lesser extent social-integrational power. The two groups distinguish between two dimensions of threat, but what threatens one group evokes either security or no threat in the other. Perceived power, threat, and intensity of conflict are best predicted by political affiliation, although other social and political predictors were also found. A profile of the right wing in the Israeli sample emerged, which resembled, but did not mirror, the profile of the left wing in the Arab sample.