Beyond Conflict: Ef ectiveness of Cooperation for Social Change [COOPERA]

The diversity of the current sources of social threats (economic, symbolic, political, environmental) leads to the emergence of cooperation strategies between groups aimed towards common goals. Such alliances might be formed between disadvantaged groups (e.g., LGBT movement to confront homophobia), or between advantaged and disadvantaged groups (e.g., men’s support for gender equality movement). As a result of our previous project (PID2019-111549GB-I00), we concluded that intergroup cooperation is an effective form of coping with social threats that may promote social change. Specifically, we analyzed three different forms of intergroup cooperation (recategorization, coalitions, and politicized shared-identities) with different implications for social change and intergroup relations. In this project, we aim to deepen our understanding of intergroup cooperation as a form of coping with large social threats from the perspective of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. We focus on the general hypothesis that in order to promote social change, intergroup cooperation needs to acknowledge and negotiate the existing intergroup conflicts. We propose that intergroup conflict is also necessary (and compatible with cooperation) in order to increase the possibility of success when groups must work together to create coordinated solutions to address global threats. Thus, we propose a bidimensional model of intergroup relations and will focus on how this offers a particularly valuable way of understanding how groups can work together to respond to global threats. Building on the results of our previous project, in this project we focus on three relevant sociopolitical intergroup contexts, in which intergroup cooperation dynamics are currently under the scope of the scientific community: a) Gender relations (cooperation between boys and girls; feminists and LGBTIQ+ movement cooperation); b) Socioeconomic inequality (cross-class cooperation to combat socioeconomic inequality); c) Pro-diversity movements against the raise in xenophobic and far-right political parties and discourses (e.g., multiculturalism).