War and Peace as Social Representations. Cues of Structural Stability.

The present study explores the structural stability of peace and war concepts, adopting a social representation approach. A word association task to the stimuli conflict, peace, and war was submitted to 206 Italian university students in 2004 and 2005. The data were explored through correspondence factor analyses and the analysis of frequency and rank of association. The results show that the social representation of war focuses chiefly on images of death and blood. Peace, on the contrary, is represented in terms of ideals, interpersonal relations, and metaphors. In 2005, new elements functional in peacebuilding, such as respect and cooperation, enter the representation, but the representation of peace is still not as stable and strong as war. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.