11. Social theories develop and transform in and through dialogues that simultaneously take place in multiple interactions and dialogues between the creator of a theory and numerous other factors. They provide us with rich evidence of struggles and tensions between:

• creative individuals and powerful institutions dominated by political, ideological, and religious forces

• general patterns of thought in specific time periods due to cultural and historical influences (zeitgeist)

• creative individuals and audiences (peers, the public)

• creative individuals and their doubts, hopes, and imagined others.

Throughout these dialogues, we have observed responses to the question ‘who is the individual and what is society’, which dominated Moscovici’s thinking throughout his life. They also answered another query that he kept raising: ‘what is “social” about social psychology’ (Moscovici, 1972/2000, p. 54)? To that end, the theory of social representations and communication is approaching its goal. It has showed who the Self is and who Others are, and who is individual and what is society. By following this path, and by exploring in a holistic manner the dynamic and complex phenomena in daily practices, such as health, education, politics, and ecology, it has the potential of becoming an anthropology of modern culture.

The breadth of psychology’s history underscores the importance of learning about the present from the past, and psychology’s past is certainly fascinating. Several approaches to the study of intellectual history, particularly for psychology, are presented, as are some of the major recurring themes that are addressed in the book. Finally, the study of the history of psychology as an area of specialization within the discipline focuses on the resources available for serious pursuit.

The third part to this work employs a body of scholarly literature to both highlight the presence of the past in mass mediation and the reciprocal nature between mass media and the society it serves. By focusing on the existence of “mediated memories” in Israeli and Palestinian mass media, Scoop on the Past illustrates the usage of the past as a prospective memory in line with the society’s contemporary concerns. Both in Israeli-Jewish society and in Palestinian society, traditional forms of mass media are analyzed that in the period under review have enjoyed the largest readership and circulation and, consequently, constitute the most important cadres sociaux. An historical analysis of media content produced on the respective memorial days – Yom ha-Shoah and Yawm al-Nakbah – highlights the construction and maintenance of a national collective memory vis-à-vis these historical events. The primary focus on anniversary journalism is accompanied by a secondary analysis on the construction of daily Nakba and Holocaust media memories. In this context, semi-structured interviews held with Palestinian and Israeli journalists on their role as memory agents testify to the desire and need to include their societies’ respective pasts in routine media so as to continually evoke the past and its contemporary meaning.

Chapter 2: This chapter begins by observing that the repertoire of science plays is dominated by works in which scientific issues are the subject of the drama, rather than a mode of exploration, in symbiotic relationship with those of the theatre itself. This kind of symbiosis can occur only if the collaborative process is set up at the outset, so that the script evolves in concert with all aspects of staging and enactment – a method pioneered by Theatre de Complicité, under the direction of its founder Simon McBurney. Taking as a case study McBurney’s stage adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity, the chapter explores the question of how consciousness might be staged, rather than talked about. Central to the experiment is the process of working with metaphor, both as literary conceit and as an approach to theatrical realization.

The first part of this chapter describes the background to and the main elements in the negotiation of Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The second part of the chapter analyses the negotiations, examining the conduct of the negotiations and the drafting outcome from the perspectives of key actors (principally US, UK, Soviet, French and ICRC delegations) with accompanying observations on positions taken by other delegations. The chapter then examines the implications of the negotiating history for the five hypotheses, finding that the drafting reflects a balance between competing symbolic costs and benefits arrived at largely through processes of principled contestation and moral and technical persuasion, conducted against the material backdrop of the nascent Cold War and decolonisation, as well as a broader humanitarian international normative Zeitgeist.

The first section of the chapter draws together the findings from Chapters 3 – 5, revisiting Chapter 1’s ‘straw-person’ Figure 1 in light of the case studies to produce a more fine-grained portrait of how hypothesised and other factors contributed to shaping the civil war regime. This is followed by a reconsideration of how these factors combined in different instances to produce drafting outputs.

Negotiating Civil War has sought to provide a rounded, nuanced, portrait of the emergence of the Civil War Regime, leveraging the explanatory capacity of carefully selected theoretical propositions derived from mainstream IR research traditions. The following discussion assesses the extent to which this endeavour has been successful, and identifies wider lessons that can be derived. The first section sets out the key findings from the case studies and the examination overall. The second section sets Negotiating Civil War in the context of related bodies of research and considers scholarly and practical implications. The final section draws the volume to a close.