Abstract

Social psychological research has largely overlooked the factors that shape support for territorial secession, even though secession movements can heighten the risk of conflict escalation. Secession campaigns often draw on identity politics: strong identification with an ethnic, cultural, or religious group is used to mobilize support for seeking autonomy or independence. These movements frequently emerge in response to perceived cultural or economic threats. Social psychology can help understand how identities and threat perceptions shape support for secession, and what psychological mechanisms may contribute to secession-related conflicts.
The project focuses on two post-conflict contexts with secession tendencies: the Basque Country (BC) in Spain and Republika Srpska (RS) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both regions have autonomous governance structures and are inhabited by ethnic groups with strong secessionist movements. Regardless of these commonalities, both have different contextual backgrounds. These differences are crucial to consider in exploring the varied dynamics of secessionist support.
We employ a social psychological approach based on social identity, relative deprivation, and intergroup threat theories. Our exploratory model suggests that different national and ethnic identity patterns, along with collective relative deprivation, are important factors influencing support for secession. Moreover, group-level psychological mechanisms, especially perceptions of intergroup threat, play a mediating role. Our model posits that different identity patterns and collective relative deprivation can predict varying levels of perceived cultural and economic threat, leading to different levels of support for secession. The model also investigates the impact of indispensability meta-perceptions (perceptions by members of groups motivated to secede about how indispensable the outgroups may think they are) on the relationship between identity, collective relative deprivation, and perceived intergroup threat.
The project involves two work packages. In the first, we use cross-sectional surveys to collect data among Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Basques in Spain. This package explores the relationships between national and ethnic identification, collective relative deprivation, and various secession-related outcomes. The second work package involves experimental manipulations of indispensability meta-perceptions to test their effects on secession-related outcomes and perceived threat. We will analyze data using structural equation mixture modeling, allowing latent profiles to serve as predictors in a structural equation model. The goal is to provide a nuanced understanding of social psychological factors that contribute to support for secession and related outcomes. We expect the project findings to be particularly useful for political and civil society actors who are interested in constructive ways of dealing with conflict in contexts with secession tendencies.