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In a broader social context where the social divisions have increasingly come to be seen through cultural or ethnic lenses, one-sided concern with identity dynamics runs the risk of defining social categories in essential terms, emphasize issues of cultural incompatibility, and reduce social influence phenomena to ingroups allegiances. Mugny and his colleagues argued that minority influence and social identifications processes interacted in such a way as producing conditions allowing outgroups to exert a genuine influence. Adopting an interactionnist approach to the study of racism and xenophobia, which in turn builds on Axel Honneth’s (1996) philosophical theory of recognition, it will be argued that assuming the very possibility of outgoup influence emphasizes the role of the "voice", in particular of minorities, as chance to enter into processes of persuasion. This voice can be seen as a bulwark against the ethnic and cultural divisions that undermine contemporary societies’ democratic purpose. Keywords: Minority influence, struggle for recognition, outgroups, prejudice, racism, xenophobia. How to Cite: Sanchez-Mazas, M. (2018). Minority Influence and the Struggle for Recognition . International Review of Social Psychology, 31(1), 8. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.41 Handling Editor: Fabrizio Butera Université de Lausanne, CH X close 1538 Views 271 Downloads 1 Citations 7 Twitter Published on 19 Mar 2018 Peer Reviewed CC BY 4.0 In this paper, I will propose an articulation of minority influence research (Pérez & Mugny, 1986) with Honneth’s work on recognition (1996). Drawing upon the German philosopher’s theory, I contend that conflictual social relations between majorities and minorities originate from denials of recognition that tap the diverse forms of modern prejudice and discrimination (Sanchez-Mazas, 2004). This perspective has been used as a general framework into which we have integrated social psychological approaches of prejudice and recent empirical findings (Licata, Sanchez-Mazas & Green, 2011). Holding prejudiced attitudes towards ethnic minorities or immigrants is one of various ways of denying them recognition. The targets of prejudice and discrimination are therefore to be categorized as outgroups from the majority viewpoint, since these groups – ethnic minorities, immigrants or people of immigrant descent, asylum seekers – do not benefit the rights and/or esteem that are granted by default to majority members. This is of particular interest for a conceptualization of outgroup minority influence framed in terms of struggle for recognition within diverse historical contexts.

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