Oral Presentation by Sona Manusyan¹
¹ Yerevan State University, Armenia
TIME: Thursday, 16 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 2
Session: 18
Abstract
Drawing on an ongoing study of civic (dis)engagement and perceived agency in the layered, insecure Armenian context of post-revolution disillusionment and post-war recovery, I examine how the political language around “peace,” circulated through government-affiliated media and articulated in the idiom of prevailing Western policy discourse, positions citizens as objects rather than agentic subjects. I explore how this language is experienced and resisted, and what it does to the subject’s perceived agency – individual and collective. Bringing together ongoing critical analysis, reflexive media study, researcher self-positioning, and qualitative interviews, I argue that the prospect of peace—anchored in genuine public need—is simplified and imposed top-down, without authorship or voice. Framed in externally accommodating, Western-facing terms, this discourse risks functioning as a subtle form of subjugation: disciplining a defeated society through a vocabulary that is ostensibly unquestionable. Peace talk becomes part of the political taming toolbox, carrying implicit messages of conditional acceptance into the western space contingent upon “good behavior,” while de-historicizing a collectively endured conflict and sidelining the immediacy of war memory, grief, and grievances of an emerging democracy. I identify two intertwined mechanisms through which this mind- taming operates: psychologizing and de-historicizing. Structural, historical, and geopolitical complexities are reduced to cognitive and emotional deficiencies of the defeated nation. Public suffering is reframed as maladaptive affect; historical trauma is downplayed; predominately external critical discourse is assimilated as self-criticism. In this way, collective memory and identity are implicitly attacked, agency is displaced. Juxtaposing dominant political discourse with reflexive first-person accounts, I demonstrate how subjects critically interpret, negotiate, and at times resist these imposed “truths.” The analysis reveals both the possibilities and limits of reasserting lifeworld perspectives under multiple ideological pressures and the silent, hard-to-articulate anxieties of the subjects. I conclude by arguing for more critically engaged psychological scholarship in safeguarding collective self-worth and sustaining perceived agency in recovering societies.