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Collective Vulnerability
Collective vulnerability is a state in which the integrity and social fabric of a community is or was threatened through traumatic events or repeated collective violence. In addition, according to the collective vulnerability hypothesis, shared experience of vulnerability and the loss of shared normative references can lead to collective reactions aimed to reestablish the lost norms and trigger forms of collective resilience.

This theory has been developed by social psychologists to study of the support for human rights. It is rooted in the consideration that devastating collective events are sometimes followed by the calls for measures that may prevent the same event could be repeated. For instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was directly born from the World War II horrors. Psychological research by Willem Doise and colleagues shows indeed that after people have experienced a collective injustice, they are more likely to support the reinforcement human rights. Populations who collectively endured systematic human rights violations are more critical of national authorities and less tolerant of rights violations. Secondary data analyses performed by Dario Spini, Guy Elcheroth and Rachel Fasel on the “People on War” comparative survey data shows that when individual have direct experience with armed conflict are less keen to support humanitarian norms. However, in regions in which all the social groups in conflict share a similar level of victimization, people claim more the need for the reestablishment of social norms, as human rights.