States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering

By Stanley Cohen. 2001

1,661 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e8669e7526eec984833f58b9c6256649a641c76

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

State Crime by Proxy and Juridical Othering (2005, background): “States routinely develop spoken and unspoken arrangements for concerted and deliberate ignorance concerning such actions as part of broader strategies of denial (Cohen 2001).”
Green identity, green living? The role of pro-environmental self-identity in determining consistency across diverse pro-environmental behaviours (2010, background): “Innovative strategies are required to use people’s guilt or shame to motivate change, rather than disempowering and risking denial or apathy (Cohen, 2001; O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009).”
Social-Psychological Interventions for Intergroup Reconciliation: An Emotion Regulation Perspective (2016, background): “Those who are not aware, or those who defend themselves from such a realization, have little psychological basis for feeling guilt about their ingroup’s actions (Cohen, 2002; Leach, Iyer, & Pedersen, 2006).”
Dehumanization and guilt as distinct but related predictors of support for reparation policies (2008, background): “The TRC was a crucial component of the transition to full and free democracy in South Africa and, despite some flaws, is generally regarded as having been very influential (Cohen, 2001; Krog, 1999).”
Climate Change and Society: The Chimera of Behaviour Change Technologies (2012, background): “Such splitting, Cohen (2001) argues, is significant as a social practice of denial, which is rewarded in capitalist societies where the dissociation of means from ends enables convenient fictions and evasions to be perpetuated.”
Suppression, denial, sublimation: Defending against the initial pains of very long life sentences (2017, background): “While sometimes referring to outright abjuration of the commission of a specific offence, denial is more appropriately acknowledged as existing on a ‘continuum’ of behaviours (Cohen, 2001: xi; Levenson and Macgowan, 2004: 52).”
Theorizing “Difficult Knowledge” in the Aftermath of the “Affective Turn”: Implications for Curriculum and Pedagogy in Handling Traumatic Representations (2014, background): “Empty empathy resorts to a sentimental discourse of trauma and vulnerability that evokes pity for the other sufferers rather than compassionate action (Boltanski, 1999; Cohen, 2001; Geras, 1999), leading learners to voyeurism and passivity (Zembylas, 2008, 2013c).”
‘When saying you care is not really caring’: emotions of disgust, whiteness ideology, and teacher education (2014, background): “Emotionally speaking, Valenzuela provides a critique to how emotions can present themselves as in appearance only or sentimentalized as opposed to genuinely feeling them, leading to voyeurism and passivity (Boltanski, 1999; Cohen, 2001; Geras, 1999).”
Silencing the Past (2010, background): “As previous research has indicated, public acceptance of the meaning of in-group harmful actions toward others is an infrequent phenomenon (e.g., Cohen, 2001).”
What do I Care? Perceived Ingroup Responsibility and Dehumanization as Predictors of Empathy Felt for the Victim Group (2009, background): “A more likely psychological response is denial of ingroup responsibility (Cohen, 2001) and an inability to take the perspective of those who have been victimized (Čehajić & Brown, 2008; Manzi & González, 2007).”
Anxiety and climate change: a validation of the Climate Anxiety Scale in a German-speaking quota sample and an investigation of psychological correlates (2021, background): “Following Cohen’s work on the denial of human rights violations (2001), climate-relevant defensive, self-protective strategies can be classified into literal denial (i.e., denial of hard facts), interpretive denial (i.e., distortion of facts or emotional distancing), and implicatory denial (i.e., re”
Why Have the Leading Journals in Management (and Other Social Sciences) Failed to Respond to Climate Change? (2008, neutral): “But has it really only recently been confirmed by science, or has there been a “culture of denial” (Cohen, 2001)? Also, what is an acceptable lag? Many social scientists found the evidence convincing some time ago.”