The Cost of Dissent from War Crimes Denial: Can Family and Neighbours Help Individuals Address In-group Responsibility for Mass Atrocity?

To move towards reconciliation, all sides in a conflict need to engage with former foes and recognise responsibility for war crimes by in-group members. However, acknowledgement of in-group wrongdoing in interactions with an opposing side is costly in post-conflict contexts. Dissenters from ethnocentric narratives of violence that attribute criminal responsibility exclusively to the other side are punished by being stigmatized as traitors. How can an inter-ethnic dialogue with speakers addressing their side’s culpability be encouraged? Drawing on inter-group contact hypothesis, we test whether support from family and neighbours can challenge the silencing effect of dissenters’ stigmatization. We conduct a survey experiment in three post-conflict countries: Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where a dominant social norm proscribes acknowledgment of in-group’s war crimes in inter-group interactions. We find that both family and neighbours’ support increase willingness to acknowledge in-group wrongdoing in Serbia. However, in Kosovo, only family support increases willingness, while in Bosnia, only neighbours’ support has the same effect. The paper advances little understood determinants of willingness to have inter-ethnic contact and address in-group’s wrongdoing needed for societies’ recovery from conflict.