Model of collective violence—Structural and psychological antecedents of pogrom violence

• Published date: 01 June 2024
• Author: Mikołaj Henryk Winiewski,Dominika Bulska
• Date: 01 June 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21420

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Model of collective violence—Structural and

psychological antecedents of pogrom violence

Mikołaj Henryk Winiewski | Dominika Bulska

Center for Research on Prejudice, Faculty

of Psychology, University of Warsaw,

Warszawa, Poland

Correspondence

Mikołaj Henryk Winiewski, Faculty of

Psychology, University of Warsaw,

ul. Stawki 5/7, Warszawa 00-183, Poland.

Email: mikk@psych.uw.edu.pl

Funding information

NCN grant Harmonia, Grant/Award

Number: 2017/26/M/HS6/00114

Abstract

This paper proposes a multidimensional approach to

collective violence. Stemming from the literature on

collective violence and intergroup relations, a

sociostructural model is proposed, functionally con-

necting the structure of intergroup relations with the

variety of collective violence. Three archival databases

on anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland and the Russian

Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries are

used to demonstrate the variability of types of pogrom

violence and its relations with social structure. The

results are discussed in light of various intergroup

threat theories.

1|INTRODUCTION

Collective violence is justifiably the focus of many social scientists. Few social phenomena seem

worth explaining more than what makes regular citizens grab sticks, machetes, or rakes and

beat, rape, murder and rob their neighbors. However, in social psychology, the rapid develop-

ment of which was greatly influenced by WW2 and the Holocaust (Ross et al., 2010), most ana-

lyses focus on essential social or cognitive mechanisms relatively distant from collective

violence (e.g., attitudes, group dynamics, aggression, or obedience). Moreover, most of the anal-

ysis in various other fields (from history to political science) focuses on the critical question of

how it happens. Researchers dealing with collective violence in its various shades, from

pogroms to genocide, try to explain the causes and risk factors or to unravel the tangle of events

and social, economic, and political factors leading to acts of violence. In this paper, based on

the extensive literature on collective violence, the psychology of intergroup relations, and data

on pogroms, a new approach to collective violence will be proposed. The new idea focuses on

the function of violence in intergroup relations. In other words, it is based on the assumption

that behavior in such relationships is not only the result of the structural aspects of a situation

but also of a psychological process related to how the parties perceive each other and what

Received: 11 August 2022 Revised: 17 October 2023 Accepted: 20 December 2023

DOI: 10.1002/crq.21420

Conflict Resolution Quarterly. 2024;41:453–474. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crq © 2024 Wiley Periodicals LLC. 453

intergroup emotions are expressed towards each other. Violent behavior is treated as a “tool”to

achieve group goals and a “function”of intergroup emotions and perceptions. Based on these

assumptions, it can be concluded that violence will take a different form depending on the situ-

ation's structure, how the group of victims is perceived by the group of perpetrators, and what

goals the perpetrators want to achieve. In other words, we can expect that a minority pogrom

based on religious aversion will have a different course than that resulting from implementing

political goals or the violence that can be observed when the “threatened”majority shows

minorities their place in the social structure.

2|ANTI-JEWISH POGROMS AND COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE

Throughout 19 and first half of the 20th century, the lands of Poland and the Russian Empire

witnessed the eruptions of anti-Jewish pogroms. Political and economic turmoils and tense reli-

gious relations between Jews and majority groups were the background for collective violence.

The complexity of these circumstances on international, national, and local levels is far beyond

this paper's scope. In our work, we try to get an abstract understanding of the basic mechanisms

of collective violence using the history of anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe as an example.

A wave of pogroms sweeping the larger and smaller settlements allows analyzing the structural

predictors that are operationalizations of social-psychological theories. A more detailed descrip-

tion of the specific context can be found in other papers of this special issue as well as in specific

works on the given period, especially on pogroms of 1903–05 (Lambroza, 1992) and pogroms in

lands of Poland (Kijek et al., 2019).

David Engel (2010) describes problems related to the definition of what a pogrom is, starting

with the differences in the understanding of particular concepts, through the nonspecificity of

the elements of the definition, and ending with the politicization of the term. In the case of this

text, the definition of the word pogrom is not crucial; nevertheless, to understand certain limita-

tions of the presented analyses, we must first devote a few words to this definition. We treat the

anti-Jewish pogrom as a specific manifestation of a broader phenomenon of collective violence.

Thinking about the pogrom from the social psychology perspective, we adopt a very general

perspective devoid of a specific historical context. The main goal of our analysis is to describe

the basic mechanisms of collective violence. The purpose of this approach is not to specifically

analyze collective violence against Jews in Poland or in the Russian Empire but to try to under-

stand the mechanisms of collective violence in general, regardless of who is the perpetrator and

who is a victim of violence, but also regardless of the historical and social context in which we

consider specific events. Of course, it is not about ignoring the political, social, or economic sit-

uation in which acts of violence occur but rather about treating the elements of the context as

generally as possible. Thinking in these terms, we are interested in the social structure. For

example, we look at the disproportions in the size of the perpetrator and victim populations

and the resulting sense of group threat (Quillian, 1995) and the difference in the status of the

groups or economic niches they occupy and the related realistic conflicts of interest (Sherif

et al., 1961) or perceived relative deprivation (Pettigrew et al., 2008). In analyzing pogroms in

this way, we can easily allude to similar cases of collective violence. In the same categories, we

can then consider the pogroms that swept the Settlement Zone in Russia in the first decade of

the twentieth century and the outbreaks of anti-Islamic violence in India in the second half.

In returning to the specific definition of a pogrom, the second important determinant of our

understanding of collective violence is the context of the projects. This paper will present data

454 WINIEWSKI and BULSKA