War experiences and emerging rights claims in postwar former Yugoslavia: The role of generalized conflict exposure and collective anomie

Abstract

Violent conflicts have often been observed to generate social environments in which human rights violations are more easily tolerated and legitimized. However, recent research has documented cases in which communities exposed to violence react with increased condemnations of human rights violations. In this article, we focus on the distinction between generalized and particularized violence. Our findings show that, in the postwar ex‐Yugoslavia context, when local communities have been exposed to violence that was generalized across different ethno‐national groups, they strongly condemn human rights violations. Multilevel structural equation models show that the relationship between generalized victimization and the condemnation of human rights violations is mediated by a collective sense of anomie. The processes that move from collective exposure to violence to the collective reaffirmation of human rights are more likely to unfold in communities where violence transcended group boundaries than in communities where particular groups were disproportionately affected by the violence.

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“…The main obstacle to the emergence or maintenance of a sense of common fate in the face of danger stems from an unequal distribution of risks and burdens (Penic, Elcheroth, & Morselli, 2017;Spini, Morselli, & Elcheroth, 2019). When certain sub-groups feel invulnerable, the sentiment of all being in the same boat is reduced.…”

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“…Additionally, we controlled for overall victimization levels in the regions, to confirm that the relationship between reconciliation and justice depends on the type, and not just the overall intensity of violence. Finally, we controlled for the overall distribution of victims across groups in regions, operationalized with the generalization of risk index (GRI; Spini et al, 2019; see SOM). The index is based on the absolute differences in victim rates across n groups in a region.…”

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