Hope Amidst Conflict

Abstract How does hope for peace form and proliferate in the seemingly hopeless reality of intractable conflicts, and why do despair and fear often prevail? How do political elites utilize hope and skepticism to manipulate their public during conflict? And how does hope manifest itself at the societal level? These questions are not only thought-provoking but also highly relevant to the political realities of millions of people worldwide who are struggling for justice, equality, and peace. Hope Amidst Conflict takes on the bold challenge of answering these questions by merging insights from philosophy and social psychology and investigating hope for peace in an intense political context—the intractable violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Hope for peace has gathered scholarly attention in the past decade. However, the work has been focusing on the mechanisms of hope while failing to ask the bigger questions about hope’s role in the politics of conflict. Moreover, existing research presents a confusing account of what hope “is” and how it can be measured. This confusion yielded mixed results regarding the levels and consequences of hope during conflict. Combining the wisdom of more than a hundred years of scholarship on hope with insights from original data collected in conflict zones, this book offers a novel, concise but comprehensive conceptualization of hope and a standardized way to measure hope in a wide array of contexts. Using these new approaches, the work embarks on a journey to identify the determinants and consequences of hope amidst conflict.