Posted on Friday, November 4, 2005
Dr. Andrea Grove, assistant professor of political science at Westminster College, had her research published in the November issue of Foreign Policy Analysis.
"Problem Representation and Conflict Dynamics in the Middle East and Northern Ireland" was co-authored by Donald Sylvan, a professor at The Ohio State University.
"The article explores the hypothesis that the existence and centrality of leaders' problem representations can help explain cooperative and conflictual behavior, in a manner that adds to more widely used scholarly explanations," Grove said. "The research contributes to efforts to understand the dynamics of the protracted conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, highlighting that cognitive factors can explain variation in the level of conflict initiated by a group when structural variables remain constant.
"We find that in these conflicts, people on one side of the conflict react more to the way the leader of the other side represents the situation than they do to their own leaders; the implications of this finding are being explored in a second phase of the project," Grove said.
Contact Grove at (724) 946-7254 or e-mail groveak@westminster.edu for more information.
