Grievances and victimhood in social and political engagement

We invite research that interrogates how experiences of grievance and victimhood — whether personal, collective, real, or perceived — shape political and social engagement. We are particularly keen to attract scholarship that focuses on the social and behavioural psychological dimensions of grievance formation, mobilisation, and political expression. 

Research is invited on a range of themes, including but not limited, to: 

• Individual vs. collective grievance: Humiliation, personal insignificance, lack of recognition vs. group-based injustice, marginalisation, and exclusion. 
• Theories of grievance–motivation: Applications of relative deprivation theory, significance quest theory, and other motivational models. 
• Victimhood typologies: Rights-based, risk-based, and moral victimhood — psychological profiles and consequences. 
• Identity and chronic salience: How recurring exposure to group-based harm sustains grievance salience and fuels political behaviour. 
• Social categorisation and grievance amplification: The role of perceived group boundaries in reinforcing victim narratives. 
• Group belonging as a grievance container: How collective identities serve as repositories and amplifiers of perceived harm. 
• Political behaviour and blame attribution: Victimhood as a psychological justification for intergroup hostility or action. 
• Forms of political expression: Protest, political engagement, radicalisation, or withdrawal based on grievance trajectories. 
• Minority experiences: Grievance construction among racial, sexual, ethnic, or religious minority communities. 
• Symbolic and perceived injustices: Emotional responses to symbolic or cultural threats (e.g., statues, cultural erasure, historical revisionism).