Xenia Chryssochoou obtained her Ph.D. from the University Rene Descartes‐Paris V and taught at different universities in France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom before returning to Greece where she is currently Professor of Social and Political Psychology at the University of Panteion in Athens. She is interested in the social psychological aspects of identity and its construction in liberal societies in relation to conflict, political participation, and questions of cultural diversity.

J. Christopher Cohrs is Professor of Psychology at Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany. After receiving his doctoral degree (Dr. Phil) in 2004 from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, he was Lecturer in Psychology at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. His research focuses on ideology, political attitudes, prejudice, and representations of intergroup conflict. He is cofounder and coeditor of the international open‐access Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

Stephen Gibson is a social psychologist based at York St. John University, UK. His research interests are in the areas of dis/obedience, citizenship, and national identity, and representations of peace and conflict. His most recent work has examined the archived audio recordings of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in order to develop a perspective on these studies as rhetorical encounters. He is the coeditor of Representations of Peace and Conflict (with Simon Mollan, 2012), and Doing Your Qualitative Psychology Project (with Cath Sullivan and Sarah Riley, 2012).

Artemis M. Griva received her Ph.D. in social psychology in 2014. She is currently a researcher at the University of Crete, Greece, and her research focuses on the social psychology of identity, globalization, and the sociocultural aspects of government policy. She has worked on research projects funded by the European Union (EU) and is author of scholarly and policy‐oriented publications.

Christopher J. Hewer is Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Psychology at Kingston University, London where he teaches critical social psychology and the psychology of art and film. His research interests focus on collective memory, shifting memorialization, and forgetting in cultural discourse. Recent projects have addressed issues arising from contemporary memory in Britain for the Allied bombing of Germany and the Falklands conflict. Other work has explored the social construction of terrorism, national identity in Kosovo, and attitudes to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Republika Srpska.

Caroline Howarth is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is committed to a form of social psychology that intersects with current social and political concerns—particularly those that lead to programs for social change. Living in multicultural communities in Kenya, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji has influenced her approach to social psychology, directing her interests towards the political interconnections between community, identity, representation, and resistance. She is coeditor of Political Psychology, editor of Papers on Social Representations, and she publishes widely across social, community, and political psychology.

Sarah Jay is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research integrates social psychology with sociological theory, and explores social class as a system of inequality. The objective of her research is to promote social justice and to use social psychology to examine and expose taken for granted systems that advantage the powerful.

Jack S. Levy is Board of Governors’ Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, and an Affiliate of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He is past‐president of the International Studies Association and of the Peace Science Society. His primary research interests focus on the causes of interstate war, foreign policy decision‐making, political psychology, and qualitative methodology. He is author of War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (1983); coauthor (with William R. Thompson) of Causes of War (2010) and of The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation, and Transformation (2011); and co‐editor of Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals (with Gary Goertz, 2007), The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd ed. (with Leonie Huddy and David O. Sears, 2013), and The Outbreak of the First World War: Structure, Politics, and Decision‐Making (with John A. Vasquez, 2014).

Simon Locke was formerly Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University, UK. His research interests focus on rhetoric, conspiracy discourse, and the intersection between comic books and the public understanding of science. He is author of Re‐Crafting Rationalisation: Enchanted Science and Mundane Mysteries (2011).

Evanthia Lyons is Professor of Social and Political Psychology at Kingston University, London, UK. Her research focuses on people’s understanding of political processes and the factors that influence their engagement in conventional and unconventional political actions. She has recently completed an EU funded, multinational project looking at the processes that influence political participation among young people from different ethnic backgrounds. More recent work has focused on the way that people manage multiple group memberships; particularly, how different patterns of identification with ethnic, national, religious categories relate to prejudice, social stereotyping, political trust, and political violence. She is coeditor of Changing European Identities: Social Psychological Analyses of Social Change (with Glynis Breakwell, 1996) and Analysing Qualitative Data in Psychology 2nd ed. (with Adrian Coyle, 2016).

Shelley McKeown is Lecturer in Psychology in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland in 2012 where she was part of the Peace and Conflict Psychology Research Group. Her research focuses on understanding social identity processes and how best to reduce prejudice in diversity and conflict settings.

Orla Muldoon is Professor of Psychology, based in the Department of Psychology and Centre for Social Issues Research at the University of Limerick. Her broad research interests concern the impact of structural disadvantage on social identities and health and well‐being.

Fergus G. Neville is Research Fellow at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews. He is currently employed on an ESRC‐funded project examining the process and limits of behavioral spread in crowds. His work broadly concerns the relationship between social identities, norms, and group behavior, with a particular focus on crowd action, and experience. Dr. Neville also publishes research on violence prevention, and the social determinants and outcomes of child and adolescent health. He is currently an Editorial Consultant for the British Journal of Social Psychology.

Spyridoula Ntani received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Surrey, and she is currently a researcher at Panteion University, Greece. Her research focuses on the development of extreme ideologies and political participation in times of crisis. She has taught social psychology at undergraduate level at different universities in Greece and has participated in funded research projects on fundamental rights protection, health care inequalities, and gender issues.

Emma O’Dwyer is Senior Lecturer in Political Psychology at Kingston University, London. Her research broadly focuses on the ways in which individuals and groups understand and relate to foreign policy, wars, and military intervention. She has explored these issues in relation to Irish foreign policy and its link to national identity, lay understandings of armed drones, and peace activism.

Stephen D. Reicher, Wardlaw Professor, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences. He is also former Chief Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and is a Scientific Consultant to Scientific American Mind. Professor Reicher’s work concerns the relationship between social identities and collective practices. In approaching 300 publications, he has studied such issues as mass rhetoric and leadership, nationalism and national identities, social exclusion and intergroup hatred, and the psychology of obedience and tyranny. Throughout his career, he has been interested in crowd psychology and his work has transformed both our theoretical understanding of this field and also public order practices in Europe, North America, and beyond.

Ron Roberts is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University and he previously held posts at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of Westminster, King’s College Medical School, University College London, St. Bartholomew’s Medical School, Queen Mary College, and the Tavistock Institute. He is the author of numerous research articles and books, including Parapsychology: The Science of Unusual Experience. 2nd ed. (with David Groome, 2017), Just War: Psychology and Terrorism (2007), Psychology and Capitalism (2015), and The Off‐Modern: Psychology Estranged (2017).

Brian Schiff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology, and Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Centre for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention at the American University of Paris. Professor Schiff was guest editor of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development's Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course (2014), coeditor (with A. Elizabeth McKim and Sylvie Patron) of Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience (2017), and author of A New Narrative for Psychology (2017). He was the recipient of a research grant from the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace (2014–2016) to conduct longitudinal interviews on the identity stories of Palestinian students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2016, he received the Theodore Sarbin Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division 24: Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

Johanna R. Vollhardt is Associate Professor of Psychology at Clark University, USA and she is affiliated with the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research interests include psychological processes in the aftermath of ethnic conflict and genocide and, in particular, collective victimhood and acknowledgement of mass atrocities. She is cofounder and coeditor of the international open‐access Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

This book has been compiled as a teaching and learning aid for students who wish to take political psychology as part of an undergraduate program. The text is designed to inform through empirical research and critical argument, and the approach taken in this volume is quite different to other books on political psychology, not least because it includes alternative approaches to psychological enquiry that challenge our “taken‐for‐granted” assumptions about the world. In places, the reader may encounter unsettling critique, or positions that are unfamiliar or alien. Indeed, what has often been missing in political psychology is a meaningful exchange of ideas with critical social psychology, sociology, history, media studies, and philosophy. Often, when academics schooled in different disciplines, epistemologies, and methodologies get together to discuss political psychology, they often find themselves talking at cross purposes because their vision of the world and their view of psychology are quite different. It is our hope that this text will lead to a broader understanding of the different intellectual positions that academics may take toward political psychology. To create a sense of mutual exchange and exploration in the classroom, there are questions for group debate and discussion at the end of each chapter. After many years of working in higher education, we take the view that transformative education does not take place so much through learning about research findings, but more through the questions that these studies raise and the discussions that follow. We hope you find the book interesting and useful.