This chapter explores the relationship between natives and migrants in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945 using contemporaries’ memoirs. It shows that migration status and region of origin served as salient identity markers, structuring interpersonal relations and shaping collective action in the newly formed communities. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that indigenous villages and villages populated by a more homogeneous migrant population were more successful in organizing volunteer fire brigades than villages populated by migrants from different regions.

Developing an online media presence is of particular importance during a military conflict. Two motivations inform the need for doing so: legitimising the grievances underlying one’s participation in the conflict and delegitimising the opponent by demoralising it or by demonising it in the eyes of third-party observers. Between 2014 and 2018, around forty news sites were set up by the authorities of the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’. This chapter examines the content produced by four of these news sites. Three main narratives are identified: ‘business as usual’, ‘the cost of the war’, and ‘shaming the enemy’. News sites weaponised emotional discourse, with a focus on evoking fear and anger among their readers. A great deal of attention was paid to portraying Ukraine as a failed state, guilty of war crimes, which has no business continuing the war and which deliberately stymies all attempts at resolving the conflict peacefully. Conversely, ingroup identity was implicitly assumed rather than explored in detail; articles that evoked patriotism or addressed cultural events or local politics rarely explored why readers should identify with the Donbas ‘Republics’.

This chapter examines newspaper discourse in the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’, analysing the content of twenty-six local newspapers between the start of the Euromaidan demonstrations in late 2013 and the end of 2017. The goal of this chapter is to uncover the themes and narratives in DNR and LNR print media, and examine how these narratives relate back to ideology and identity building. Three main narratives are identified: ‘business as usual’, ‘war and memory’, and ‘loss and guilt’. Newspapers in the Donbas ‘Republics’ continued to perform ‘typical’ activities as a source of information for local communities. However, a significant part of their content did address the development of collective identity, for example, through references to newly instated public holidays and a kinship with Russia and the Russian language. However, this ‘ingroup’ identity remained impoverished, projecting an identity discourse without a sui generis, unifying coherence. Instead, negative descriptions of the ‘outgroup’ (i.e., Ukraine/the ‘Kyiv regime’) received much more attention, with a view to demonising Ukraine and Ukrainians in the eyes of the local population.

Chapter 4, “Ritual Assemblies and the Geopolitics of Zhou Expansion” acknowledges that the early Zhou kings conducted several major, state-level events that combined individual ritual techniques into narrative sequences depicting various potential ways of relating to their political project. This chapter examines how the royal house deployed such events as part of an integrative strategy of ritual suited to the geopolitical environment of the early Western Zhou period.

Chapter 2, “The Ritual Figuration of the Zhou Kings” examines the surviving records of a few rare but important ritual techniques that posed symbolic arguments about the relationship of the Zhou king to the social order and the natural world. The details of their implementation, as the chapter shows, reveal an effort to refigure the Zhou kings as qualitatively different from their contemporaries, with a special relationship to the natural world and its products.

In this concluding chapter, I first bring the story up to date by briefly considering influential developments since the 1990s, especially theories of governance and theories of group identity, which variously reiterate the problem of social order. I then argue that instead of positing, again and again, social order as a presupposition for political inquiry, social order should be turned into an object of political inquiry. To that end, I conclude, we may well need other conceptual and theoretical resources than those provided by the tradition of social science that is the subject of this book. Accepting the social ontology of complexity and diversity on which this tradition has been predicated does not compel us to keep relying on concepts and theories marked by the problem of social order.

The roles language played in shaping and articulating one’s identity in Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity constitute a backdrop against which the new developments attested in early Christianity can be measured. The ways in which foreign language speakers appeared in the Jewish Bible and Classical literature provided tropes, references, and allusions widely employed by early Christian authors. The chapter starts with an analysis of ancient Greek literary, historical, and philosophical compositions, from Homer to Aristotle, and investigates why the thought universe of the Classical Greek literati was virtually monolingual. It then proceeds to an overview of developments in the Hellenistic and early Roman eras and traces how the monolingual antiquity of Classical Greece gradually became the bilingual universe of the Roman empire, where Latin always shared its prestigious status as a vehicle of culture with Greek. The final section focuses on how early Jewish traditions depicted foreign languages and their speakers and how this culture adapted multilingual self-expression. In the conclusion, we discuss why language was rarely a decisive factor of group identity in these cultures and problematize the idea that the presence of linguistic differences by itself is a sufficient factor to trigger the processes of identity consolidation and objectification.

Theories of democracy all insist on some basic conditions in order for citizens to hold their elected officials accountable. One of the first ones to mention is an openness to new information about the world that might influence beliefs about a politician’s performance, character, intelligence and the like. In recent decades, BPS has discovered that this basic assumption is regularly violated. Citizens and elites often resist new and credible information in favor of their existing beliefs and viewpoints even when they would greatly benefit from updating those stands. In this chapter, we review a related set of theories captured under the umbrella of motivated reasoning that attempts to understand why, exploring the role of cognitive dissonance, self-esteem, and group identity in shaping individuals’ goals when processing information. While the field has no concrete answers yet, we at least have begun to estimate the often dire consequences of arguing from our existing attitudes to our perceptions of the world – top-down processing – instead of the other way around.

Chapter Three, “Crowds and Transformation,” synthesizes concepts of self-recovery, play, and collective intellect to explore what transformative tools and practices crowds were developing (in modernist fictional worlds) in order to identify and represent themselves, or to have as tactical weapons during their conflicts with elite authority. Conventional identity is creatively reworked by disarticulated performances such as Clarissa’s or the unnamed Captain in The Secret Sharer. The chapter maps mechanisms that produce modernity’s porous and transmissible social mind, exemplified in readings of Jacob’s Room and “Ithaca,” for example. Historical examples of street demonstrations and popular movements in the first decades of the twentieth century in England and Ireland are compared with readings of the permeable and suggestible crowds of “Wandering Rocks” and Wyndham Lewis’ writings, to differentiate what the book identifies as rising crowds from Lewis’ crowds of “extinction.” Finally, the chapter transitions to the concept of crowdedness as an ethical experience.

Climate change poses a profound challenge to human well-being and the very foundation of social justice and human rights. This chapter applies a psychological lens to understand the impacts of and responses to climate change at individual and societal levels. We describe the dire mental health implications of climate change impacts, which cause trauma and uproot lives, destabilize socioeconomic and governance institutions, exacerbate inequality by disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities, and spur conflict through resource scarcity and uncertainty. We examine group identity and belonging dynamics driving societal conflict, including competition over resources; scapegoating, hate crimes, and exclusionary politics; ethnic and political strife surrounding immigration; and political polarization and the rise of far-right parties – and consider their human rights implications. We then explore the psychology of climate inaction. Our moral judgment system is unable to grapple with a psychologically distant threat whose cause is endemic to the foundation of society. Motivated reasoning processes, including identity-protective cognition and system justification, contribute to moral disengagement and resistance to direly needed systemic changes. We offer psychologically informed approaches for overcoming inaction through communication, solution design, and empowerment. Finally, we overview international climate efforts, with a focus on the UN 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development.