Make (?) not War! Are the social representations of Peace and War antonyms?

Social representations (SR) theory provides a useful framework for the study of peace and war as object of social construction. With that purpose, a research program was established with the aim of describing the SR shared by people with different practices and attitudes regarding peacemaking. This contribution first illustrates an exploratory study on the structure of the SR of Peace and War. High school students (N = 482) completed a free association task to the stimuli Peace and War. Data were submitted to prototypical analysis. Results allowed for the formulation of element centrality hypotheses and suggested that the SR of peace and war do not interact in a relationship of strict antinomy. A second study assessing SR structure confirmation and the antinomy configuration, with online data collection, is currently under way. Differences among participants and limits of the employed techniques are discussed