It has become hard to say anything now. All I know is that besides being a loss of safety, change is also a promise.
Mongane Wally Serote
(For the reader interested in more direct conflict advice on the studied conflict and Afrikaner conflicts, as well as a more personal take on my own affiliations and foundational sources, I recommend my article at https://www.conflict-conversations.co.za/conversations/the-afrikaner-wars-escalating-afrikaner-conflicts-and-its-impact-on-the-group-and-the-nation )
Introduction
Two sentences can sound alike and mean very different things. “We are being treated unfairly” is a claim about what is done to a group, while “Nobody cares what happens to us” is a claim about where the group sees itself on a moral accounting spectrum, a calculation which often in the modern world has very direct material and safety implications. Conflict research has long been better at measuring the first than the second.
A new study in the European Journal of Social Psychology recently returned my attention to the fascinating concept of “collective anti-mattering” (the article is by Tabri, Boutros and Wohl, and it is titled “Collective Anti-Mattering – see resource list below for full citation). It argues that the second instance deserves a name, a measurement scale and a place in explanations of political grievance. Its term is collective anti-mattering, and it slots in perfectly with several other important conflict concepts, some of which we will briefly look at here, and all of which I have included extensively in my work.
These related (if not always ostensibly linked) concepts include face saving and identity conflicts (not identity politics). I want us to have a better understanding of what this collective anti-mattering means in theory, and then I want to use the current Afrikaner conflicts (we can ring-fence that from the start of the second Trump administration to the present) as a case study to show the practical conflict values of the tool, and also its limitations and scope for further study and application.
The piece is one of conflict analysis, not political commentary. I find the current Afrikaner conflicts to be very illustrative of both the concept under discussion in particular, as well as several conflict concepts in general, and I have no doubt that a similar case study can be built around say those comparative views of the Zulu group, South African youth and so on. As it is, and as the article shows, there is of course also not one monolithic “Afrikaner view” on all of these issues.
The idea of collective anti-mattering deserves our attention, I believe, because of its practical application, not just for conflict studies and praxis, but also for at least the short-term future of political conflict management in this country. Maybe if we could have a few of our senior politicians stop arguing about potholes and who they are prepared to work with, and start using the modern tools available to them. But, back to reality, then.
Since January 2025, South Africa’s Afrikaners have offered an unusually vivid setting in which to ask what that idea can and cannot explain. A helpful point of departure is to note the observable fact that since then, foreign superpower has declared their plight a humanitarian emergency, resettled thousands of them and sanctioned their government, while much of their own community, and most of South Africa, reject the premise of that humanitarian emergency, certainly as formally and informally framed by the Trump administration. As a case study, rarely does a minority’s sense of being disregarded collide so loudly with an outside power’s decision to pay it attention, and rarely does that minority respond in such visibly different ways. The consequences for a range of South African conflicts are enormous.
My aim with the article
This article does two things. It sets out what the research shows and where its limits lie. It then asks how the framework assists the South African case study, and where it should be approached with reservation, specifically regarding the Afrikaner case, and argues that it needs two companion concepts, face saving and identity conflicts, to explain why disregard, and all of the downhill concerns flowing from that, can be so combustible. It does not adjudicate persecution claims. The “white genocide” narrative adopted by the Trump administration is not supported by the available evidence, as a South African court, police statistics and independent fact-checkers have found. Equally, the scandalous South African crime statistics and an inarguable vulnerability of people on farms and rural areas should equally not be ignored or downplayed.
Equating one South African conflict arena with lots of other examples and then regarding that as progress is an awful conflict strategy, even though it remains popular among our leaders. More important for the sake of effective conflict management is the observable reality that a belief about not counting can organise behaviour whether or not any particular claim built on it is true, and understanding that is not the same as endorsing it.
A name for an old wound
Psychologists have long argued that people need to feel that they matter: noticed, valued and consequential to others. The idea goes back to Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough’s early-1980s work on adolescents, and was later developed by Gordon Flett into the concept of anti-mattering, a corrosive conviction of being insignificant, invisible or disposable, which is not merely the low end of a mattering scale. In individuals it has been linked to loneliness, distress and depression.
The new paper, by Nassim Tabri, Isabelle Boutros and Michael Wohl, asks whether the same feeling can exist at the level of a group. Not “I don’t matter” but “people like us don’t matter.” Using online panels, the authors surveyed 368 black Americans, 552 black Britons and 399 white Americans, the last sample balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Participants reported how far they believed their group was disregarded, how much anger and anxiety they felt on its behalf, how often they took part in collective action and how strongly they supported a “strong leader.” White Americans were also asked about banning diversity initiatives and about punitive treatment of undocumented immigrants.
Two emotions are immediately noticeable, right at the centre of the model.
Group-based anger is a reaction to present, illegitimate treatment (a staple of intergroup emotions research since Mackie, Devos and Smith).
Collective angst, a concept developed by Wohl and colleagues, is anxiety about the group’s future vitality, culture or very existence. In all three samples, collective anti-mattering predicted both, and was statistically distinct from personal anti-mattering and from perceived injustice.
This, I believe, very effectively extends the concept from personal anxiety to a much more potent, and politically important, group level of experience, motivation and conflict driver. It becomes an indispensable conflict tool. The emotions then diverged.
Angst, not anger, tracked collective action in every sample. Both fed support for strong leaders in the first two studies, though anger dropped out in the third. And among white Americans it was anger, not angst, that predicted support for banning DEI initiatives and for punitive measures against undocumented immigrants, reversing an earlier set of experiments in which anxiety had done that work. Average levels differed sharply: about 2.1 on a seven-point scale for white Americans, against roughly 4.0 for black Americans and 3.5 for black Britons.
The conceptual contribution is Tabri’s own distinction. Injustice concerns what is being done to a group. Anti-mattering concerns what people believe their group means to others, whether its concerns, welfare and future are regarded as consequential. People and groups want fair outcomes, but they also want recognition that they count. At the level that we are assessing, those two issues start to interact against each other.
What the evidence establishes
I believe that transparency about the evidence matters more than usual here, because the temptation to stretch a fresh finding over a charged case is strong in political terms, and of course there should be enthusiasm about a conflict tool that can read, anticipate and resolve large parts of this important conflict. Still, as I promised earlier, we will break up the study under discussion into a section where I am comfortable that the evidence supports the enthusiasm, and a section on where I believe we should tread lighter, and where further study could be time well-spent. Some detail then to show where my confidence in the former category stems from.
All three studies were cross-sectional surveys of non-representative online panels, so they establish association, not cause. The authors say so plainly and call for experimental and longitudinal work. The models explained only 6 to 12 per cent of the variation in collective action, so anti-mattering is at best one contributor among many. That recent tendency towards One Ring That Binds Them All need not apply here.
The referent of disregard changed between studies: a specific majority group in the first two, “society” in the third. “Strong leader” was measured broadly, and the authors warn against reading it as authoritarianism. Above all, they caution against equating the experiences of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. A black American’s sense of disregard can be bracketed against a history of discrimination; a white American’s can arise despite continuing structural advantage, a white or a coloured Afrikaner may have different views altogether.
That, to me, is an important part of the robust promise that the concept and its methodology shows. And no one has of course yet measured collective anti-mattering among Afrikaners, or anywhere in South Africa. What follows is confident interpretation: hypotheses derived from a framework and checked against public events, not a scientific test of the theory. Organisations and public figures are not the people they claim to speak for, and the media record over-represents the loudest voices.
A recognition cycle: 2025 –2026
The sequence matters, because it is above all a story about attention. On 7 February 2025, Executive Order 14204 directed the United States to prioritise the resettlement of Afrikaners, citing South Africa’s land policy and, among other grievances, its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The next day AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement, the two best-known Afrikaner civil-society organizations, thanked Washington for recognizing what they called injustice but declined the offer of refuge.
AfriForum’s Kallie Kriel said that “we don’t want to move elsewhere,” and argued that emigration risked sacrificing descendants’ cultural identity. In March 2025 South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled. In May the first refugees landed at Dulles, and on 21 May President Trump confronted President Ramaphosa in the Oval Office with video and printed material about farm killings. Reuters said one photograph he held up was its own, taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. South Africa’s leadership answered with figures showing that only one of six farm murders in the first quarter of 2025 had a white victim, although fact-checkers note that “farm murder” is not an official crime category and that the data are patchy.
In late October, some forty prominent Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, among them analysts, lawyers, journalists and historians, published an open letter refusing to be “pawns in America’s culture wars.” Pretoria quoted it approvingly in its own condemnation of the programme. Meanwhile the programme grew. The refugee ceiling for fiscal 2026 began at 7,500 and was raised to 17,500 in May 2026; 16,292 refugees were admitted, all but five of them South African. In September, CBS reported a notice to Congress envisaging up to 17,500 more over twelve months, at a projected cost of $500 million, and Washington announced travel bans on unnamed South African officials it accused of discriminating against whites. At home, the Expropriation Act, signed in January 2025 and cited by Trump, is under constitutional challenge in the Western Cape High Court from the Democratic Alliance, AfriForum and the Institute of Race Relations; the government maintains that its “just and equitable” compensation standard keeps it within the constitution. Several other examples are available.
Many responses, not one
If collective anti-mattering were a single concept we would expect a single response. What the record shows in our case study is at least five rather distinct groups or voices. I have labelled them provisionally based on their most visible characteristic, not as exhaustive definitions.
(i) The lobbyists: AfriForum and Solidarity chose to stay, litigate and internationalise. Their insistence that Afrikaners can survive as a cultural community only on African soil, and how they at times frame those threats and concerns against which they are mobilizing, read like collective angst: a fear for the group’s future vitality more than a protest at present poor treatment. Their channels, court action and foreign lobbying, fit the finding that angst, not anger, goes with collective action.
(ii) The leavers: Applicants to the US programme apply from inside South Africa, an unusual feature for a refugee scheme. Reporting based on interviews with participants describes many as middle-class, citing violent crime and affirmative-action policy; at least four had returned home by the third quarter of 2026, according to Reuters. The programme was later opened to other minorities, including coloured and Indian South Africans, which complicates the label “Afrikaner” itself. Exit is an individual response to anxiety that a collective-action scale does not capture.
(iii) The amplifiers: Several public figures and social media influencers welcomed American attention and attacked the open letter’s signatories, a rather widespread campaign that continues online with much heat, if not always the same level of light. This is the group-level voice most compatible with anger and with strong-leader appeal.
(iv) The dissenters: The letter’s signatories are not a loyal opposition to the ANC. A visible platform here is the Afrikaners Vir SA group, with several prominent Afrikaner public figures driving a variety of Afrikaner issues. One signatory, the commentator Hans Pienaar, notes that most of them are persistent critics of the government. What they reject is the premise, and they object to being used.
(v) The insiders: In April 2026 Pretoria named as ambassador to Washington Roelf Meyer, an Afrikaner who negotiated for the apartheid government in the 1990s. Whatever one makes of the appointment, it signals that some Afrikaners are being counted by the state they are said to be fleeing. There are others, doing work at the less visible coalfaces of this developing internal and geopolitical conflict.
As with all of my conflict work, and I suppose largely because of my litigation background, I insist that theories of conflict must earn their keep in the streets and boardrooms where they are applied. Let’s see if we can build a few testable hypotheses from our work thus far, the last developed in the section on face below. Test what we see against the study we are analysing:
H1: angst, not anger, will be the stronger predictor of participation in Afrikaner civil-society mobilization, such as membership, donations and litigation support.
H2: anger will be the stronger predictor of support for punitive or exclusionary measures, including sanctions on officials, a demand a white lobby group had already pressed on Washington.
H3: emigration intentions will be better predicted by angst combined with material precarity, such as crime exposure, than by anti-mattering alone.
H4: dissenters will score lower on collective anti-mattering but higher on a different construct, perceived instrumentalisation: the belief that one’s group is being used for other people’s purposes. H5: sensitivity to public humiliation and disrespect will moderate the link between anti-mattering and anger, so that the same perceived disregard produces more anger where it is voiced before co-ethnic or international audiences than where it is experienced privately.
Where the study needs further work and confirmation
The study is valuable and predictive of the above categories, I believe. The stay-or-leave debate is, at bottom, an argument about collective angst, about whether a language, a church, a farming tradition and a way of belonging can survive transplantation.
The pursuit of foreign sanctions looks like anger converted into punitive demands. And the “strong leader” finding acquires an odd twist: the leader who will do whatever it takes is, for some, a foreign president, whereas the study asked about leaders of one’s own group. That is speculation, but it is exactly the sort of speculation the framework should invite, and which could become really valuable with further work and observation.
A fun part of my job is that even the problems, the uncertainties of a conflict, can become important puzzle pieces. That is why I include them here, as I believe that even now they are instructive. The first friction is what we might call the recognition paradox. The attention that Afrikaner organisations had long sought has arrived from the most powerful state on earth, and mobilisation has intensified, not eased. One explanation is that being noticed is not the same as being well-regarded. Recognition from a source that many compatriots see as illegitimate, expressed through claims that fact-checkers dispute, may confirm the fear of being invisible, or an actual continued source of further conflict, to the people one actually lives among. The dissenters’ word, “pawns,” names the distinction: a group can be hyper-visible as a symbol and still not matter as an end in itself.
The second friction has much promise as a mirror, a point of reference. The black American and black British samples were asked about a named majority; the white American sample about society at large. Afrikaners might feel disregarded by the ANC government, by the black majority, by the English-language press, by the West, or by other white South Africans, and each referent could produce a different emotional profile. A South African instrument would have to separate them, at least when we start building actual strategies to resolve, manage or transform these conflicts.
The third is structural position. Hermann Pretorius of the Institute of Race Relations, himself an Afrikaner, has argued that the “genocide” story fuses two truths, racially preferential policy and horrific violent crime, into a falsehood, and that discrimination is a far cry from persecution. He argues that the “white genocide” phrase is false, but that it rests on realities.
A scientific view of our study of focus, as well as basic conflict principles will support this, as repeated public debates and arguments on the “Kill the Boer” song and the various shades of “anti-whiteness” narratives must inevitably lead to the very conditions dealt with in the study. That is the structure of the white American case in the study: a low average level of experienced disregard having to coexist with real political consequences. It is also a reminder of my earlier warning against unwarranted moral equivalence.
History adds depth. Historians such as Hermann Giliomee have traced how a narrative of a small, embattled people, abandoned by the world, shaped Afrikaner nationalism from the Boer Wars onward. A group with that inheritance may find disregard more readily noticed than most, and may need less to activate it.
Face saving, and the cost of being ignored
Disregard is rarely a private experience, and that is why anti-mattering alone understates how combustible it can be. The missing ingredient is face saving (or just “face” in most of modern literature on this): the positive public standing that a person or group claims, and defends, before an audience. Erving Goffman gave the concept its classic form, and negotiation research since Bert Brown’s experiments has found that threats to face harden positions and provoke retaliation out of proportion to the material stakes.
We see that hardening (aka conflict rigidity) happening around us, making future progress increasingly more complex. Evelin Lindner and other humiliation scholars have argued that perceived public humiliation (or disrespect, threats or unfairness) is among the most potent drivers of intergroup conflict. Anti-mattering names a belief about one’s group; face concretely sets the audience before whom that belief is staged. Being ignored where it is witnessed is what turns a vocal but private conviction into a combustible one.
The two are not the same. A group can be ignored in private without losing face, and can lose face without being ignored: ridiculed, pitied or rescued, for instance. That second case matters most for the Afrikaner debate, because being noticed is not the same as being respected and treated fairly in their view, and some forms of attention are themselves face threats. I do not suggest that Afrikaners have a distinctive culture of touchiness.
Face is a human universal, and attributing special sensitivity to a single group is how stereotypes are manufactured. The argument is structural, and rests on three features of the position, all that should be easily observable:
First, Afrikaners held the South African state until 1994 and hold comparatively little of it now. The status-threat literature suggests that dominant groups can experience the loss of standing as humiliation even when material comfort persists, which fits the observation above that white households remain, on average, relatively well off.
Second, the group carries a long memory of public humiliation, from the Boer War camps to later contests over Afrikaans-medium institutions, so new slights are read against old ones. This is one of the red flags that we will have to note in transplanting the findings of the study to say a comparable study on black voters in South Africa.
Third, Afrikaners face an audience problem. They are judged at once by the government, by fellow South Africans of every colour, by the wider world and by their own community, and a move that saves face before one audience can lose it before another. This dilemma can be observed on a daily basis.
Read through that lens, several episodes in the timeline earn important nuance. AfriForum and Solidarity thanked Washington for the recognition but declined the refuge. Recognition without departure lets a group be seen without conceding, before its own people and before the majority, that it cannot stay. Kriel’s argument about cultural survival is principled, and it also happens to be a position from which no face is lost.
The refugee label itself cuts both ways: it is a status of victimhood conferred by an outsider, which a group that prides itself on self-reliance may experience as patronising, even as individuals who need an exit embrace it. The programme’s boosters policed that boundary harshly: a prominent online adviser to applicants accused returnees of defrauding the programme, treating a return home as a loss of face for the whole narrative.
The open letter was a face attack from within, telling the world that many Afrikaners reject the story told in their name, and the reaction was swift and personal, aimed at the signatories’ standing as much as at their arguments.
The government’s part deserves equal candour. Its rebuttals of the genocide claim are, on the evidence, correct. But a rebuttal can be accurate and still be heard as “you do not count,” especially in the government’s often clumsy messaging, and treating low uptake and returnees as proof that Afrikaner fears are fictional is likely to be received that way. This is an ongoing strategic mistake made by the government – failing to sufficiently deal with various layers of these conflicts, and to approach each one with its own distinct strategy. Lumping it all together into one homogenous irritating, overstated problem inevitably and predictably leads to destructive escalation, such as the recent frustration and threats of the stripping of certain people’s citizenship, which of course leads to further cycles of conflict to be used and abused.
The mismanagement of these conflicts leads to the present configuration as the most dangerous one available: recognition from outside that cannot be accepted without criticizing or even disowning one’s compatriots, and rebuttal from inside that cannot be accepted without conceding that one’s fear is fiction or overblown. Each demands a loss of face as its price, and is an important reason why we are where we are.
Conflict research suggests the way out runs through face-saving formulas: arrangements that let each side change course without seeming to capitulate, typically by reframing the issue, bringing in an intermediary or finding a problem both sides can own. Even, from a cold conflict analysis, secession should be dealt with in the same framework. In this setting that might mean acknowledgement of rural safety, language and cultural concerns by South African institutions, in forms the community can witness, and no demand that critics of Washington’s narrative first renounce their grievances. Face is harder to measure than mattering. But face is also more likely to determine whether disregard ends in litigation and lobbying, or in something more corrosive.
Identity conflict as further crucial factor
We do not have space available here to meaningfully deal with the third category mentioned above, that of the dynamics of identity conflict on all of this. As a meta-category of conflict operating system it, in a sense, subsumes collective anti-mattering and face saving. Suffice it to say here that any specific conflict strategy will have to include an above-average understanding and inclusion of this enormous conflict factor if it is to be a successful strategy. I have written on the topic extensively, in publicly available work.
The mirror problem
The framework carries an uncomfortable corollary. If one group’s sense of disregard can be triggered by perceived indifference, so can another’s. For many black South Africans, the spectacle of a superpower treating the grievances of the community that built and defended apartheid as a humanitarian emergency, while the suffering apartheid caused goes unmentioned, or undercounted, can itself read as being disregarded. Julius Malema’s taunt, that AfriForum’s leaders should lead by example and leave if the danger is real, and the government’s use of low uptake and of returnees as proof that the programme rests on a falsehood, show each side treating the other’s pain as political evidence.
This is a most dangerous and irresponsible course to persist with. The social psychology of competitive victimhood, associated with Masi Noor, Nurit Shnabel, Samer Halabi and Arie Nadler, documents how groups in conflict compete to be seen as the greater victim, and how that competition can entrench conflict instead of resolving it. A victimhood Olympics sets up hardly noticeable cycles of conflict that are both hard to notice and hard to defuse.
The Tabri study’s own literature sharpens the worry: earlier experiments linked zero-sum views of race relations to collective angst. A politics of mattering is not inherently zero-sum, but it is easily made so, and a foreign government that ranks one group’s suffering above another’s has made it so on a grand scale. And this is also, rather visibly, where some of the Afrikaner commentators, either by design or by accident, trigger those very red flags we see across the spectrum of collective anti-mattering, face saving and identity conflicts, where the suffering of millions of people, over a period of decades, through the indefensible and immoral system of apartheid is set up as somehow equivalent to the redress and safety complaints of a minority in a democratic society.
How can we actually test this?
The agenda is clear from our assessment. First, adapt the collective anti-mattering scale for South Africa, in Afrikaans and English, with separate referents for the government, the black majority, the media and any other categories that can be argued for convincingly. Second, sample across the subgroups above, including Afrikaans-speaking coloured South Africans, who share the language but not the whiteness, and run a parallel sample among black South Africans to measure mirror anti-mattering. Third, collect panel data around discrete events, such as the sanctions announcement or the judgment in the Expropriation Act case, to see whether recognition shifts the scores. Fourth, run experiments that vary the source of recognition (a South African institution, a foreign government or a peer group) and measure anger, angst, the instrumentalisation construct and face threat, varying whether the disregard is expressed privately or before an audience. This would address my own call for causal evidence.
There is a policy implication, too, a complex topic that I deal with comprehensively in my new book. If the dissenters’ complaint is about instrumentalisation, then the most useful recognition may be the kind that arrives from compatriots without a foreign patron attached: acknowledgement of the real fear that violent crime produces in rural communities, which falls on all South Africans, without conceding a genocide frame the evidence does not support. Recognising that a group matters is not the same as ratifying its account of why.
Recognition also has to be deliverable without humiliation: a concession extracted in public will be experienced as one more loss. Here we see collective anti-mattering, face saving and identity conflicts needing the hand holding a scalpel, not a hammer.
Conclusion
The appeal of collective anti-mattering for me in the work that I do, admittedly also as a South African that does not want to be a spectator in the escalation of the complex, interrelated conflicts we are experiencing, is that it names something conflict analysts have long sensed but struggled to measure: grievance as a question about standing / respect, not only about outcomes. The Afrikaner case shows both its promise and its limits. It helps explain why a group can be materially comfortable and yet mobilised, why anger and anxiety lead to different politics, and why attention from the “wrong” audience can deepen rather than soothe the feeling of not counting. It cannot tell us who is right about persecution, and it does not tell us that Afrikaner and black South African experiences are alike.
The honest conclusion is that the question “do we matter?” is being asked loudly on every side of South Africa’s argument, and that the answers on offer so far, from Washington and Pretoria alike, treat the question as a weapon, and ask it in public, before audiences whose verdict no one can afford to lose, which is why it so readily turns to unproductive sound and fury.
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading 1. Tabri, N., Boutros, I., & Wohl, M. J. A., “Collective Anti-Mattering,” European Journal of Social Psychology, doi:10.1002/ejsp.70108, August 2026; at Collective Anti‐Mattering: Belief That One's Group Is Being Disregarded Fuels Collective Action and Authoritarian Leadership Support Among Both Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups - Tabri - European Journal of Social Psychology - Wiley Online Library (open access at time of publication of my article)
2. For further information or study on identity conflicts, see my earlier work at the Conflict Conversations, or start with something general such as Jay van Bavel and Dominic Packer’s The Power of Us, Little, Brown and Co (2021)
3. My article on the missed opportunities, and possible solutions to, the “Kill the boer” song can be accessed at https://www.conflict-conversations.co.za/conversations/sticks-and-stones-shoot-the-boer-and-the-role-of-songs-and-slogans-in-conflict
4. Our blog at www.conflict-conversations.co.za has a rich variety of articles expanding on specific aspects of the article, and conflict in general.
(Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.)
(c) Andre Vlok
October 2026
* Author’s note on the use of artificial intelligence in writing this article
I learned to draft, argue and write in the hard school of litigation. I enjoy and value the very human process of creating ideas, of testing my own knowledge and thoughts. It is a process that I need, for answering some of my professional and even personal questions, it is cathartic and inspiring. Other than the most basic research assistance I do not use any AI in the creation of my written work, this article included. It is a matter of pride, of preference, and of mental health. Whether that is a wise choice or not, I will leave to the reader to decide.