CCIG welcomes Ana Varela-Rey

We welcome Ana Varela-Rey, a visiting PhD student from Barcelona,  who has arrived in CCIG and will be staying with us until the end of March.

Ana will be working with John Dixon and Jovan Byford on her ongoing project on ETA, the legitimization of violence and choice of targets especially in relation to ingroup/outgroup identities.

Ana Varela-Rey is BA in Psychology (University of Barcelona, 2002) and BA in Political Science (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 2007). She holds a Master degree in Psychosocial Intervention (University of Barcelona, 2010) and is currently PhD candidate in Social Psychology and member of the INVICTUS Research Group at the University of Barcelona. Her PhD dissertation deals with violence legitimation discourses and their implication in peace processes, and takes the ETA terrorism group in the Basque Country as the main case study. Her research interests include terrorism; political violence; discourse of legitimation; maintenance of violence and selection of the victims, among others.

Project description

The objective in this short stay is to analyze how the positive ingroup identity and the negative outgroup identity are built in the ETA discourse in relation to the selection of their victims and the political context. The sample is constituted by communiqués of ETA and the discursive analysis will be used to analyse the documents. The beginning period and the last period of the ETA group have been selected. These two periods are the most differentiated with regard to the selection of the victims and to the historical-political context of Spain. The beginning stage was developed in the Franco dictatorship and the victims were mostly members of security forces (National Police, Guardia Civil and Ertzaina-Basque Regional Police). The last period corresponds with one of the most stable periods of democracy that Spain has experienced in its history. During this period, the selection of the victims was characterized by the socialization of suffering. Professional sectors of civil society (journalists, non-nationalist politicians or judges) became targets of their actions.