Legacies of Violence

Recent research in the social sciences suggests that families’ past experiences of violence –notably, war and displacement – shape descendants’ preferences and behaviors for generations and influence economic, political, and social decisions within these families over decades and, at times, centuries. This talk provides an overview of the cutting-edge research on the legacies of violence and describes what we know about the intergenerational effects of violence and the social processes by which family trauma is inherited. To illustrate the argument, the talk draws in part on fieldwork among victims and their descendants in Ukraine, Catalonia, Cambodia, and Guatemala. Speaker Leonid Peisakhin, Associate Professor of Political Science, NYUAD