Social Representations Approach to a Peace Process : The Case of Turkey

Abstract This doctoral dissertation describes a longitudinal research project seeking to contribute to our understanding the role of meaning-making processes in creating or obstructing societal and political transformations towards peace. The focus of the project is on the plurality and dynamicity of social knowledge in peace processes, thus I draw on the social representations theory, a constructivist approach to social knowledge. I investigated the case of the peace/resolution process regarding the Kurdish question in Turkey through three empirical studies using media data. First, various constructions of the concept of peace, their discursive function, and change in the constructions as the peace/resolution process continued are investigated by using corpus linguistic methods in the corpora of five newspapers for two-years period. Later, various representations of the peace/resolution process, their underlying cultural and ideological resources as well as their action orientations are scrutinized by performing critical discourse analysis. Lastly, various understandings of the peace process and communication strategies in dealing with other understandings are investigated by conducting qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis on readersa comments to an online newspaper. Through these studies, I investigate the historical, cultural, and political factors that influence constructions of different understandings of peace. I look at how these various subjective understandings exist together, how they deal with each other and how they orient people to treat othersa understandings. I also identify how the various understandings change as a result of interactions with each other and adapt to changing physical realities. Lastly, I interpret how these various understandings constitute social context that promote or impede social change towards peace. By doing so, I address the reciprocal and simultaneous influence between society members and social and political context through plurality and dynamics of social knowledge. I argue that focus on these relations provide a conceptual framework to address the complexity of move towards peace.