Is an Interdisciplinary Approach Key to Studying Interethnic Violence and Conflict?

In his review of Explaining the Breakdown of Ethnic Relations: Why Neighbors Kill (edited by Victoria Esses and Richard Vernon), Jeffrey Noel notes that a strength of the book is its interdisciplinary nature, which "includes contributions from psychology, education, sociology, philosophy, and political science." He highlights a quote from contributors Miles Hewstone, Nicole Tausch, and colleagues: "Social conflict is more complex than intergroup bias. … Real-world intergroup relations owe at least as much of their character to history, economics, politics, and ideology as they do to social psychological variables such as self-esteem, ingroup identification, group size, and group threat. (p. 65)."

Are social scientists of any discipline doomed to fail at understanding interethnic violence if they refuse to collaborate to study this very complex set of causes? For example, should social psychologists (in psychology) who often study prejudice in the lab actively collaborate with historians, economists, sociologists, and others? Should this be the future of studying interethnic violence and conflict?

Read the Review

Against the Blood-Dimmed Tide: Psychology’s Response to Mass Killing and Genocide
      By Jeffrey Noel
      PsycCRITIQUES, 2009 Vol 54(18)