Semester of Graduation
Fall 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
International Conflict Management
Department
School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Charity Butcher
Second Advisor
Dr. Darina Lepadatu
Third Advisor
Dr. Paul Story
Abstract
Peacebuilders have utilized positive intergroup contact in various settings to help groups encounter each other. I implemented three different intimate imagined contact scenarios in Peja, Kosovo with Albanian and Serb participants. I conducted this research to understand how multiple intimate social settings could impact individuals’ encounters with the outgroup during each imagined scenario, thus gathering better operationalization efforts regarding intimacy and imagined contact. Using written responses, interviews, and one-year follow-up interviews, the café and workplace scenarios created a positive experience for most participants, and while half of participants had a positive experience with the fiancé scenario, many more had negative experiences compared to the café and workplace. Younger participants responded more favorably to the imagined scenarios than older ones and that confrontational topics such as politics and the war had to be absent for the encounters to be successful. However, while participants stressed the importance of intergroup contact, there was generally not a desire among them to initiate such contact, and they insisted that more time was needed to successfully have positive interethnic interaction. The rare interethnic contact participants did have the year after the imagined scenarios was by circumstance and not desire, although many of them, especially the younger ones, were open to sustained imagined scenarios and were adamant that interethnic relations needed to be improved. Moving forward, perhaps continuously imagined contact scenarios with uncontentious conversation during the course of weeks or months could help individuals encounter the outgroup more favorably.