Recent years have seen increasing attention to struggles over national and ethnic
identities, mirroring the real world identity-based ethnic conflicts that have had
a resurgence in the 1990s. Comas-Diaz et al (1998) offer a comparative analysis
of ethnic identity and conflict in three Latin American nations, Guatemala, Peru,
and Puerto Rico. Arguing that ethnic conflicts are intimately related to ethnic
identities, they link an explicit social psychology of liberation to indigenous social
psychologies. Rouhana & Bar-Tal (1998) ask why some ethnonational conflicts
are more entrenched than others, using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to argue
that societies in particularly intractable conflicts form societal beliefs that help
them cope with, but also perpetuate, these conflicts. They also speak to ways in which social psychological work on social identities can change such beliefs, thus
contributing to immediate societal concerns.