Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.

This chapter spotlights the profound impact of the comprehensive and tragic sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990s. These multilateral and bilateral sanctions, ostensibly aimed at eliminating non-existent weapons of mass destruction, led to a devastating humanitarian catastrophe, claiming around two million lives, largely children. The chapter delves into intricate dynamics, including US interventions, military actions, regime changes, and foreign occupation until 2011. It examines how these sanctions shaped pre- and post-invasion crises and systemic corruption. Legal dimensions are explored, probing issues of genocide, human rights violations, and international charters, revealing a complex web of consequences, actions, and implications within this historical context.

This is the third and final of the book’s mini-studies of dignity. Jumping forward in time again to twenty-first-century South Africa, this chapter revolves around an object that bears on an important aspect of what many people today understand by dignity: the toilet. As one campaigning slogan has it, ‘sanitation is dignity’. South Africa is a country in which there exist large disparities in the distribution of sanitation services, with black South Africans considerably less well served than white South Africans. The chapter follows the efforts of poor black communities to secure or defend sanitary dignity through litigation and public protest.

The philosopher David Chalmers believes we may be on the cusp of a great migration, one likely to overshadow every wave of human migration in history: the move to a virtual world or worlds, as the real one continues to degrade. In centuries to come, instead of asking: ‘should we move to a new country to start a new life?’ we may ask: ‘should we shift our lives to a virtual world?’. As with emigration, often the reasonable answer may be ‘yes’.1 With sufficient computing power, virtual reality will no longer consist of pre-packaged individual experiences. It will become a concurrent and real-time platform where billions of people can meet to conduct business, shop and have fun. In one of his online interviews, the journalist Dean Takahashi called the metaverse ‘the most difficult and important thing humanity will ever build’.

In Chapter 5, we propose our categorization of the four main kinds of personal narratives of genocide and intractable war – Distancing, Victimhood, Ambivalence/Paradoxes, and Embracing the Other while Remaining in One’s Pain – that joins conceptualizations and understandings connected to the development and dynamics of group identity, intergenerational trauma and types of coping, and genuine dialogue between former and present-day “enemies.” We combine these conceptualizations into a theoretical model that proposes the conditions that can either encourage sustainable reconciliation and positive peacebuilding or, unfortunately, obstruct peace endeavors, in contexts of genocide and/or intractable war. The theoretical model focuses on conditions that exist on two main levels: the personal and intergroup level, and the macro-social level.

In Chapter 6, we present examples from the four different kinds of personal narratives that we conceptualized that connect to genocide and war, with this chapter focusing on the Holocaust. Our four types of personal narratives are termed: distancing, victimhood, ambivalence/paradoxes, and embracing the other while remaining in one’s pain. In this chapter, we present and analyze long quotes from narratives of Jews and (non-Jewish) Germans who are descendants of Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Our examples come from a variety of sources – interviews that we undertook over the years with members of the first, second, and third generations, internet sources, YouTube, research books that present narrative interviews, and memoirs and autobiographies that exemplify the different kinds of narratives. This chapter, then, presents concrete examples of the different kinds of personal stories that we find in the context of speaking and/or writing about the Holocaust, mainly among the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of the war generation.

Is it possible that we have more capacity for change than we are currently expressing? This chapter begins by assessing the historical importance of the Covid pandemic, arguing that it helped revise how we look at the economy. If the way the economy works can be recreated to eliminate the risk of a viral infection, then it can presumably be recreated for the sake of other, equally desirable social goals. At first, one might think these changes signal the return of industrial policy, but I argue that world building differs from industrial policy because it operates at the level of the background conditions under which economic life takes place. These background conditions include the fight against climate change, the provision of skills and political stability and the creation of comparative advantage for national industries. In the end, however, the most general background conditions are formed at the global level. They are the framework conditions of global economic integration, and the need to shape the framework conditions for economic activity is not unrelated to the fact that other states are also trying to shape them. Indeed, both the United States and China believe in the idea of a world system articulating the relations of economic power and dependence at the heart of the global economy.

Chapter 9 proposes topics and issues that connect to further research of personal narratives of genocide and war, and their connections to sustainable peace and reconciliation. This chapter proposes four different areas that have relevance for further exploration of this topic that can be explored qualitatively, quantitatively, or via mixed methods. The four research arenas are: (1) exploration of the categories of personal narratives of genocide and war; (2) personal narratives of genocide and war and their ties to societal transformation; (3) personal narratives and coping with the effects of genocide and war; and (4) further exploration of our conceptual model concerning kinds of personal narratives and the conditions that can either encourage peacebuilding processes or peace obstruction.