Introduction
Peacebuilding, healing, reconciliation
International peacebuilding is a tremendously complex and varied field of practice, policy, and study. It encompasses, but is not limited to, a wide range of post-conflict situations where international interventions seek to prevent conflict or a relapse into conflict and to create a “sustainable peace.” There seems to be no end to the impressive literature on post-conflict peacebuilding, statebuilding, and reconstruction. Much of the work being done takes “top-down” and state-centric approaches that emphasize the structural and institutional impediments to building peace and stability. This literature is devoted to examining the effectiveness of peacebuilding operations, to devising “best practices” and identifying the institutions and conditions conducive to “peace,” and at times has become intertwined with international statebuilding (Chetail 2009; Doyle and Sambanis 2006; Howard 2008; Paris 2004; Paris and Sisk 2009). What brings this literature together, the critics argue, is the intrinsic liberal project of political order and of building states based upon the Western model of market democracy. Indeed, this “liberal peacebuilding” has faced severe criticisms and is argued to be in crisis (Chandler 2010; Cooper 2007; Pugh et al. 2008). The debates have become so intense as to develop “the contours of an epic intellectual struggle” (Richmond 2010a: 2) and the perceived need for liberal peacebuilding to be saved (Paris 2010). While there is now a substantial critical literature within political science and international relations that questions institutionalist and “liberal peace” arguments, the critiques remain largely based upon state-centric assumptions (Hameiri 2010: 21–33).
Within this political science literature, few, if any, have mulled over the psychology of trauma and the dynamics of individual and social healing. Although this is well covered in journals such as Political Psychology, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, and Journal of Peace Research, as it will be discussed below, there is relatively little on the relationship between individual and social psychological effects of war and violent conflict and what these effects mean for the possibilities of political reconciliation,1 and next to nothing in terms of comparative studies of these effects and how they can be mitigated. It seems safe to say that most scholars and policymakers are well aware of these effects, of the significance of “bottom-up” dynamics, and of the need to include the local population in peace processes and peacebuilding projects. The multi-dimensional and multi-sectoral characteristics of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and reconstruction are recognized as necessitating activities beyond the construction of state institutions, ranging from economic reforms, to demilitarization, to building civic attitudes and institutions, to transitional justice and truth commissions, to individual healing, and to peace dialogue and training (Doyle 2007). In practice, peacebuilding is a concept that frames and organizes the different activities of a remarkable number of actors, whether they are states, international institutions, or various organizations – including NGOs – that often come together in regional, multilateral, and/or multinational settings. This multiplicity of actor and activity translates into critical divergence in approach to and conceptualization of peace-building (for an overview of these differences, see Barnett et al. 2007). And yet, it is far from clear how this acknowledgment of “bottom-up” dynamics and of the multi-dimensionality of peacebuilding translates into an understanding of how the psychology of trauma and the dynamics of healing inform the formal debate about peacebuilding.
As many of this book's chapters demonstrate, the violence of conflict has profound and lasting emotional and psychological effects of trauma that are intertwined with practical consequences of social disruption, but such links seems often to be forgotten, taken for granted, and/or assumed to be solved through internationally sponsored peace processes, development initiatives, and mechanisms of political reconciliation. After the physical and psychological trauma, and the material deprivation that characterize most – if not all – post-conflict societies, the period of individual healing and recovery cannot be separated from political and social reconciliation. Given the attention that many peacebuilding scholars are now paying to addressing the “root causes” of conflicts rather than treating their effects, the political and socioeconomic institutions that international peace-builders promote and construct have done little to favor healing of individuals and social groups. As scholars of psychosocial healing argue, and as our contributors confirm, the prospects for social and political reconciliation are undermined when structural stability and order are prioritized over the widespread trauma that affects most individuals and social groups.
This book has two key objectives. The first is to contribute to an understanding of the psychology of trauma, healing, and recovery in post-conflict situations. This involves an examination of the psychosocial impacts and consequences of both conflict and various peacebuilding practices. Indeed, the psychology of trauma is not limited to the violent experiences of conflict. The post-conflict context and peacebuilding activities can generate diverse psychosocial effects that are not necessarily conducive to peace and that, in fact, can reinforce or reignite trauma (Hamber 2009; Herman 1997; Keilson 1992; Parent 2010, 2011). Our contributors examine these questions from a variety of perspectives and starting points, but they converge in how their analyses of such questions suggest the need for a deeper investigation and understanding of the very meaning of the “peace” that various peacebuilding approaches claim to be building. Put another way, the study of psychosocial healing and of the psychology of trauma involves more than improving, replacing, or integrating “top-down” with “bottom-up” approaches and more than looking for “better practices.” It often entails questioning how we think of “peace” by recognizing the intersubjective processes implicated in building, living, and thinking “peace,” and integrating this dimension into international peacebuilding practices.
The second objective is intimately connected to these intersubjective processes: how can the study of psychosocial healing and psychology of trauma inform the larger debates about peacebuilding, about the ways in which peace can be built, and about the kind of peace that ought to be possible or impossible? It is insufficient to take into account the psychosocial impacts of conflict and peacebuilding practices, as if scholars, policymakers, and practitioners simply needed to consider or accommodate psychosocial factors as variables in an equation. The problem is much more complicated because psychosocial recovery and the psychology of trauma and their associated practices are already engaged, if not embedded, with the international and “top-down” activities of peacebuilding. They can hardly be separated, if at all. Indeed, as Patricia Maulden argues in her chapter, peace processes imply re-living and remembering the war and the violence, thus potentially contributing to the endurance of trauma and suffering. Hence, there is an urgent need to examine the intimate but underestimated relationship between processes of healing and reconciliation. It is one of our claims that objective notions of “root causes,” causation, and post-conflict reconstruction are meaningless unless connected to the intersubjective understanding of the conflict and of the post-conflict situation held by those that lived through it. This book assumes that while psychological symptoms are borne individually, they are created socially and shared reciprocally, and thus necessarily intertwined with political and economic processes and practices.
There are numerous books and articles on peacebuilding that explore various cases, that use different approaches, and that criticize diverse aspects of peace-building. Yet, very few have aimed at integrating or at proposing ways to integrate the various levels of peacebuilding activities, with John Lederach's Building Peace (1997) being the one worthy exception. There seems to be a kind of division of labor between psychologists like Brandon Hamber (2009), sociologists such as Louis Kriesberg (2007), and social psychologists like Ervin Staub (2003) who focus on local communities and individuals, and the political scientist types who emphasize state and international elements. Scholars of peace psychology such as Cristina Montiel and Daniel Christie (2008) argue that processes of peace and violence are embedded in all levels of analysis: individual, community, national, and international. Yet, while they are aware of each other, scholars of (political) peacebuilding and scholars of psychosocial healing rarely – if ever – talk to each other. One group of scholars argues that the building of political and economic institutions and structures will promote peace, while the other group argues that peace begins first in psychosocial emotions and cognitions.2 If they talk to each other or discuss each other's work, debates are framed, respectively, between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches (for example, see Autesserre 2010). While, as Sandrine Lefranc argues in her chapter, many “bottom-up” approaches have evolved, cohered, and justified their programs in opposition to and as critiques of “top-down” approaches, the differences are usually overstated and used to legitimize specific programs that often work to reinforce institutional and judicial perspectives.
This book proposes different ways to challenge and question the very nature of the dichotomy between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches, thus seeking to open new avenues of research and interdisciplinary cooperation. This book seeks to move beyond debates over the virtues of “top-down” versus “bottom-up” alternatives because they often obscure the shared and interconnected local-global histories of practices of international peacebuilding interventions. This is no simple task and our collective effort is only one step in this direction.
The chapters do so in two linked, but not completely overlapping, ways. One is to put at the centre of the analysis the question and interplay of history, memory, and sociological practices and experiences of conflict and peacebuilding. The attention given to the historical contexts of conflict, peacebuilding processes, and reconciliation efforts allows an examination of the (inter-)subjectivity of peace and peace processes; that is, the examination of peace processes at the intersection of social, political, and economic structures and institutions and of complex human psychologies, intersubjectivities, and interactions. This strategy of historicizing healing and trauma brings into focus how individual and collective memories are generated, and how they inform peace and reconciliation processes. The question of historical memory is intimately tied to identity formation and the identification of victims and perpetrators. Consequently, it constitutes an arena of struggles over what is considered to be legitimate knowledge of the conflict, the post-conflict situation, and the prospects for peace and reconciliation. As Lorraine Ryan and Gabriela Fried Amilivia show in their respective chapters on Spain and Uruguay, the struggles over the social narratives are significant in determining the conditions of possibility or impossibility for peace or reconciliation. Carl Bouchard's chapter reinforces this argument through his unique perspective and historical analysis of the ways in which European men and women addressed the issues of peace and reconciliation after World War I, and how their perceptions and cognitions about peace both reached for a universal ideal of peace, and yet remained constrained in a particular and Eurocentric understanding of the possibility of peace.
The second strategy is to point out where “bottom-up” approaches to peace-building are hardly distinguishable from “top-down” approaches, or how an understanding of the former is incomplete and unsatisfactory without an understanding of the co-articulations. As editors, we do not presume to assign primacy to any perspective or approach, but instead we seek to open the debate and sustain discussion about the significance of the relationship between “top-down” and “bottom-up” peacebuilding practices, between the psychological and the structural and institutional, and between global and local contexts. Instead of taking these relationships for granted, we assume that these various dynamics are complex, contingent, negotiable, contested, and internationalized. The analysis of formal apologies for past crimes or atrocities by Angel Ryono and Graham Dodds in their respective chapters, the analysis of transitional justice and truth-telling exercises in the chapters written by Sandrine Leblanc, and by Julian Poluda, Judith Strasser and Sotheara Chhim, and the analysis of restorative practices by David Senesh and of joint dialogue initiatives by Julia Chaitin all point to the complexity of these relationships, and to the difficulties, if not the impossibility, of separating the “bottom-up” from the “top-down.” In her chapter, Karina Korostelina studies and assesses various history education programs that, in fact, acknowledge and work with(in) the relationship between the construction of consensual historical narratives and the possibility of healing and reconciliation.
It seems that international peacebuilding efforts have forgotten the experiences of their subjects: the needs, rights, and historical milieu of the post-conflict citizen (see Richmond 2010c). The emphasis upon healing and trauma situates the post-conflict citizen at the centre of the analysis, but this should not be done at the expense of the larger and specific political environment and processes. Psychological dispositions and cognitions – traumatic or not – are grounded in specific historical locations. The construction of historical narratives and memories of conflict, community, Self, and Other reflects a politics of identity – national-ethnic, regional, victim/perpetrator, gendered identities, and so on – that cannot be disconnected from the psychosocial dispositions specific to post-conflict environments. We will come back to the specific ways in which each chapter discusses these questions. But first, we need to discuss further the literature and debates.
Peacebuilding
Current political science and international relations peacebuilding debates have links with and roots in peace and conflict studies (see Richmond 2010a: 14–38), with Johan Galtung (1976) usually credited for coining the term peacebuilding. Even though – or because – the notion has come to encompass an increasing number of interventions and domains of intervention since the end of the Cold War, there is still no canonical definition of peacebuilding. Yet, in international organization and governmental circles, the diverse definitions have roots in the United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's understanding of the concept as a post-conflict activity or action “to identify and support structure which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid relapse into conflict” (Boutros-Ghali 1992: para. 21). According to his successor Kofi Annan (1998: para. 63), peacebuilding refers to “actions undertaken at the end of a conflict to consolidate peace and prevent a recurrence of armed confrontation.” John Paul Lederach (1997) expands the concept beyond post-conflict intervention and reconstruction by speaking of conflict transformation as a holistic and multifaceted approach that seeks to transform social relations, attitudes, behavior, and structures in order to cultivate an “infrastructure for peacebuilding” oriented towards the building of positive relationships. Roland Paris (2004: 38) adds that it involves “the deployment of military and civilian personnel from several international agencies, with a mandate to conduct peacebuilding in a country that is just emerging from civil war.” In the words of Michael Doyle: “Effective peace-building … creates a unified polity, one army, a return to civilian participatory rule, an economy geared to civilian consumption, and the first steps toward reconciliation” and, if successful, “peacebuilding changes not merely behavior, but, more importantly, it transforms identities and institutional contexts” (Doyle 2007: 9; our emphasis). Thus conceived, peacebuilding can be nothing less than a long-term investment of international intervention in post-conflict societies.
As already noted, there are numerous approaches to peacebuilding. The differences highlight that peacebuilding missions and activities can involve phases of prevention, management, and/or resolution of conflict that include the use of force. Indeed, for Michael Barnett and his colleagues, the debates, conflicting interests, and approaches surrounding peacebuilding “suggests that one of the concept's talents is to camouflage divisions over how to handle the postconflict challenge.” There is no international consensus on what peacebuilding activity should prioritize, emphasize, or even what should come first, but there is “widespread agreement … that peacebuilding means more than stability promotion; it is designed to create a positive peace, to eliminate the root causes of conflict, to allow states and societies to develop stable expectations of peaceful change” (Barnett et al. 2007: 44). Being more specific, Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams are not convinced that there is such a wide agreement, but for the cohesion of various peacebuilding activities around the promotion of the “open market” as a way to build a durable peace. Neoliberal economics and associated ideas of development underpin, according to them, all post-Cold War peacebuilding interventions (Mac Ginty and Williams 2009: 51; see also Pugh et al. 2008).
For the critics, this “widespread agreement” entails far-ranging international projects and practices of interventions that have been severely criticized and likened to a “new imperialism,” a “neo-colonialism,” or to the hegemony of the “liberal peace.” David Chandler argues that the building of political and economic institutions by international actors leads to institutions with little to no legitimacy in the eyes of the local populations, and to a de facto “empire” that does not dare speak its name (Chandler 2006). For others, the key problem is the liberal nature of Western policy-interventions. Interventions carry a hegemonic and universalizing project of liberal market democracies that results in the maintenance of structural inequalities and conflicts. The problem is identified as the relationship between Western liberal interveners and non-liberal and non-Western others, where the West claims to possess on behalf of others the know-how to peace, progress, democracy, and development (for instance, see Dillon and Reid 2009; Duffield 2007). Edward Newman (2009: 26–53) finds it hard to accept that there is one single – liberal – philosophy that dominates one coherent peacebuilding agenda. According to Chandler (2010: 40), the issue is not that of liberal universalism, but “one of restricted possibilities, where democracy and development are hollowed out and, rather than embodying the possibilities of autonomous human subject, become mechanisms of control and ordering.”
Indeed, what these approaches and debates often obscure are the local dynamics of healing and reconciliation and their resilience, and thus the local possibilities for peace. Peacebuilding is implicitly understood as an external intervention, as something coming from outside and not built from within, to promote and build peace for a population needing to be saved. As such, peacebuilding neglects, obscures, or rejects local agencies (Richmond 2010c). It seems to us that this largely explains the distance and distinctions made between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches. Examining healing and reconciliation processes is one of the ways in which local agencies and capacities can be brought to the center of the peacebuilding activities, although it is not a research strategy that is without risks as interventions aimed at local ownership, local capacity-building, and other participatory approaches have been known to legitimize “top-down” approaches at the local level rather than engage with local agency (see Chapter 2 by Lefranc; also Kapoor 2008: 75).
From the bottom up: trauma, healing, reconciliation
In terms of psychological and psychosocial healing and recovery, natural disasters and man-made accidents are usually distinguished from conflicts and wars that involve intentional human violence, thus underlying the specificity of post-conflict trauma (Volkan 1999, 2006, 2008). Norris et al. (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of 160 studies on traumatic stress and noted that human-made disasters caused a higher level of psychological impairment than environmental disasters. Rather than accepting the event as “fate,” “God's will,” or human negligence, individuals and societies traumatized by armed conflict and war must cope with “enemies” or “others” who deliberately inflicted pain, torment, and misery on other human beings (Volkan 1999). Volkan – “a pioneer in the diagnosis and treatment of societal trauma” (Zelizer and Rubinstein 2009: 189) – has argued that traumatized individuals and societies may experience psychosocial changes, going through shame, victimization, guilt, rage, entitlement to vengeance, and a loss of trust or faith. Furthermore, armed conflicts and war generate a particular group identity process where large groups of people experience and share responses to massive trauma that reflect aspects of individual responses such as helplessness, humiliation, post-traumatic stress disorder, polarizing identities created out of inflicted pain that reinforce a “we-ness” or “togetherness”, and so on. These responses then “take a life of their own” and re-emerge in societal, political, and cultural processes (Volkan 2006). Trauma generates social polarization and the collective erosion of social ties between individuals, groups, and communities (Beneduce et al. 2006; Hamber 2009; Martin-Baró 1994; Staub 2006).
The extent of the trauma and what can be done about it is closely associated to context. In particular, ethnic, religious, and/or ideological conflicts that are based upon long-term and deep-rooted intergroup differences and characterized by sporadic outbursts of violence (Azar 1990) and perpetuating cycles of violence that are often trans-generational (Lumsden 1997) pose significant challenges. They not only lead to massive costs in terms of human lives and economic and social infrastructures (Wallensteen and Sollenberg 1997), but their long-term historical dynamics are also more likely to lead to resistance to conflict resolution initiatives associated with peacebuilding practices. Many scholars argue that when “the impact of such trauma is denied or repressed, it will still manifest itself in various ways in new generations” (Volkan 2008: 95; see also Chapter 3 by Ryan; Davies 1997; Green 2009; Hamber 2009; Hunt 1997; Minow 1999; Staub et al. 2008).
Healing can only be a long, complex and nonlinear process (Parent 2011). It cannot be or represent an absolute outcome (Bar-Tal and Bennink 2004). The path towards healing differs from individual to individual, from group to group, from community to community (Galappatti 2003; Kandowitz and Riak 2008). There seems to be no clear rule or formula for healing (Green 2009). Nevertheless, Judith Herman's three stages of healing are representative of the literature: 1) the guarantee of one's safety; 2) remembrance and mourning; and 3) reconnection with “ordinary” life (Herman 1997: 290). The first stage is to establish the survivors’ safety and is argued to take precedence over other needs because the issues of memory, mourning, and restoration of social connections and daily routines cannot occur without it.3 Herman explains that “security” begins with the control of one's body and then progressively works towards the social environment. Such control includes, for instance, satisfying basic healthcare needs and regulating bodily functions such as eating and sleeping – which are usually greatly disturbed by conflict-related trauma. Once the body is under control, the traumatized person needs a “safe refuge,” a place where the body feels safe from harm, and from which an individual can re-establish contact with social environments (Herman 1997). Mimica and Ager (1997) found a “safe space” to be more important than any kind of psychological intervention. Hamber (2003: 158) points out that: “By removing the fear of repetition from the lives of survivors and the families of victims, more psychic space is created for healing.” Establishing safety usually implies a social network that can provide emotional and practical support. Caring individuals often become an essential connection between the traumatized individual and society.
The second stage of healing is argued to consist of “telling” to reconstruct the traumatic memory so that it can be integrated into day-to-day life. Herman indicates that the traumatic memory is wordless and static, thus stagnating the healing process. To encourage healing, the victim's traumatic memory needs to be put into dynamic words via a social and individual reconstruction of the traumatic experience (Herman 1997). Throughout this stage, the survivor confronts and uncovers difficult questions. A better understanding of events implies multiple interpretations that connect the personal experience to a larger context, but also avoids one-sided understandings that focus on the dispositions of the individuals involved with the “other group.” As Joseph Montville (2001: 119) wrote: “Storytelling is an essential part of the process” for the victims who are “reconstructing the story” and for the individuals who are “representing the aggressor group.” Herman indicates that the crucial importance of remembering, mourning and memory is found where the polarization – “us” versus “them” – can be decreased or exacerbated. The reconstruction of events can facilitate a comprehension that emphasizes factors of contingency and ambiguity that suggest possibilities of transformation and peace, rather than stable and fixed factors such as the nature of the “enemy” that suggest the impossibility of reconciliation and peace. It has been argued that mistrust, fear, polarization, and aggression represent primary barriers to recovery (Lira 2001). As Schirch (2001) argued, when one perceives the “other” in its complexity and multiple identities rather than through the prism of “enemy,” he or she gives the “other” the space to change, and thus transformation can occur. The reconstruction of the traumatic memory must include an account of life before the traumatic event. The reconstruction of the temporal “flow” of the survivor's life – that is, linking the past to the present and to future circumstances – is an important step towards healing (Danieli 1988; Staub et al. 2008).
In the third stage, it is argued that survivors are ready to reconnect with “ordinary life,” including contact with other people outside the close support group: however, the location where “ordinary life” occurs, or ought to occur, might involve dealing with the “others” or the “offenders.” Having encountered inhumanity in others with whom, in cases like in Rwanda, one used to share significant life experiences, assumptions about social ties, norms and rules of behavior are significantly affected. Assumptions, knowledge and expectations of suffering individuals concerning the behavior of others are shattered. In turn, this affects an individual's capacity to restore positive social connections, and subsequent responses and reactions to national and/or international peacebuilding practices. As Clancy and Hamber argues:
What needs to be “healed” is … the multitude of individual, political, social, and cultural responses to a traumatic situation and its aftermath. This requires assistance from a range of agencies, groups, and different parts of society. Extreme political trauma is not just a health problem, but a socio-political problem. Therefore, it is unsurprising that attempts to heal trauma have become closely associated with efforts to build peace and sustainable development in societies affected by political violence.
Clancy and Hamber 2008: 9–10
However, peacebuilding initiatives have brought little to no change in post-conflict societies where healing is not prioritized. Taylor-Ide and Taylor (2002: 89) stressed that “a crisis weakens the community's vital resources. The wounds must be healed and strength rebuilt for forward progress. Otherwise, fracture lines may open up again, with crisis breeding further crisis.”
In short, in this “bottom-up” literature, trauma healing is a key element of a peacebuilding process and “work on trauma includes the work on individual and collective trauma” (Puljek-Shank and Puljek-Shank 2008: 160). For Gutlove and Thompson:
Psychosocial healing is an integrated-action process that seeks to promote the psychological and social health of individuals, families, and community groups. It is especially important in a post-conflict environment, where the stress of violent conflict has impacted individuals and the social network. The healing process addresses the individual's psychological health and ability to function in relationship to others (relational health) and the relational health of the society as a whole.
Gutlove and Thompson 2006: 193
Indeed, heed must be paid to the interaction of individual and socio-institutional factors that can stimulate the conflict (Kelman 1979, 2004, 2008), and can lead to its escalation and its intractability (Fisher 1997). Specifically, a conflict is, in part, a subjective social process where the parties’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviors constitute key influences in the interaction between them (Fisher 1989). According to Summerfield (1995), victims’ reactions to extreme trauma depend on “what it means to them.” Peaceful resolution of conflict can thus hardly work without a careful and serious understanding of cognitions, emotions, and associated elements of (mis-)perceptions and (mis-)trust integral to all social interactions (Fisher 1997).
Within this large literature which we have discussed briefly, Clancy and Hamber distinguished approaches to war-related trauma between the “psychotherapeutic approach,” the “psychosocial alternative,” the “rights-based approaches,” the “indigenous approaches,” and the “gender-based approaches.”4 They argue that a majority of academics and practitioners found the psychosocial paradigm to be the most suited to dealing with conflict-related problems, notably psychological trauma (Clancy and Hamber 2008). Yet, many have noted that there is little agreement on what the notion psychosocial implies and that there is even less agreement on what should be the plans, goals, and practices of psychosocial interventions (Ager 2002; Clancy and Hamber 2008: 2; Pupavac 2001; Wiles et al. 2000).
Lindsay Stark (2006) notes that in humanitarian responses, interventions addressing psychological and social factors have increased but without a consensus on what type of intervention is most effective. She goes further, however, to reveal the risks involved in these types of intervention. She identifies two schools of thought: the “pathologizing western medical” framework and the framework “which draws on community resources and supports local strategies.” The first is based upon the “Western understanding of trauma and healing” (Stark 2006: 206) and emphasizes the diagnosis and the treatment of symptoms of individuals, thus largely if not completely ignoring the social context and socially available resources found in the community that could support trauma healing. This approach disregards the context of armed conflict and war, and is imposed from the outside to the passive and disempowered “patient.” Farwell (2004) has deplored these Western methods on the basis that they do not allow space or legitimacy for local healing practices. Wessells and Monteiro (2001) even consider such interventions as instances of “psychological imperialism.” The links to the promotion of (Western) individualism as a value, morality, and mode of life are here, at the very least, latent if not manifest, thus indeed making this pathologizing framework open to critiques of cultural Western hegemony.
The second paradigm is established on the assumption that “psychological distress has a social and a cultural dimension.” It emphasizes the importance of “relationships between individuals and their surroundings, their ancestors and amongst themselves” to heal from trauma (Stark 2006: 207). As Summerfield (1995) argues, trauma generated by violent conflict and war is experienced by the person as a member of a family, community, and other social formations. Put another way, trauma is borne individually but produced socially and shared reciprocally. In short, the psychological trauma goes beyond the individual and healing must take place in a collective context, without isolating the individual. Otherwise, such interventions can victimize and hurt further the survivor (Hamber 2009; Lykes 1994). Moreover, the ways in which individuals maintain their “psychological equilibrium” and/or seek help are – at least in part – determined by the cultural and sociopolitical environments and by the intersubjective understandings of these environments (Tribe 2002). Within this perspective, victims and survivors have and retain knowledge and skills that contribute to healing, reconciliation, and reconstruction, but these resources and abilities are delegitimized or undermined by international – or state – interventions (Bracken 1998, 2002; Summerfield 2002), or instrumentalized to justify international approaches (Kapoor 2008). Vanessa Pupavac (2004: 377) also deplores pathologization and “international therapeutic governance,” and contends that the latter can obstruct post-conflict recovery by weakening communal bonds and by inhibiting and delegitimizing local resources and coping strategies. Other scholars have also argued that the dominant Western paradigm pathologizes post-conflict trauma, thus keeping the civilians in a state of victimhood, perpetuating their problems by dismissing their resilience and by denying their coping strategies (Anderson and Christie 2001; Fletcher and Weinstein 2002). Moreover, while these interventions focus on the intrapsychic “pathology” of the individual who becomes dysfunctional or invalid, a key consequence is that no attention needs to be paid to the political demands of victims and survivors. Important social and political issues related to the causes of the conflict and to the possibilities of reconciliation and peace are obscured, neglected, or de-contextualized by the focus put on survivors’ pathologies.
This is the point where the critics of dominant approaches seem to agree: that “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches converge in their propensity to neglect, ignore, or even undermine local agencies. It seems that, from both directions, from the top down and the bottom up, peacebuilding interventions can work to depoliticize the conflict and the peace. Proponents of peacebuilding have had few convincing answers to these critiques other than to work on improving their techniques or by asking the critics to present fully formed alternatives to (liberal) peacebuilding (see Paris 2010; Richmond 2010d). To make “bottom-up” approaches relevant to peacebuilding is therefore not to argue that they are better or more relevant than their “top-down” counterparts. This would reify the distinction and miss the intimate connections. Institutional reforms and better state and international policies are obviously badly needed, but trauma cannot be addressed and healing cannot progress without proper social conditions, just as peace and reconciliation cannot be supported and advanced without engaged and healthy citizens. The distinction is flawed, as this book seeks to demonstrate. It is not, however, irrelevant because making the distinction is a political act with concrete consequences. It creates spaces of social action and reaction where a specific understanding of peace and reconciliation – usually defined on elites’ terms or in internationalist circles – is promoted and in the process of being imposed.
In this book, making “bottom-up” approaches relevant is a research strategy to highlight the difficulties but also the possibilities of peacebuilding by, through, and for local agencies. The fact that victims and survivors of conflict are or were traumatized and injured by various acts of violence does not mean that they are impotent and need to be “saved” by the state or by the international community. A key objective of this collection is to restore to the center of the debate and the practices and processes of peacebuilding the very political subject or “clients” of peacebuilding.
The structure of the book
The first two chapters deal with the theoretical and conceptual difficulties in, and consequences of, imagining and building peace from “below,” and how “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches are hardly separated in practice. In Chapter 1, “The post-conflict paradox: engaging war, creating peace,” Patricia Maulden examines trauma, post-conflict healing, and recovery based on her fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Burundi. For Maulden, the post-conflict paradox is the difficulty raised in attempts at envisioning and building the peace while inevitably remembering and perhaps re-living the war. To analyse this paradox, she deploys the notion of “social suffering” to blur the boundaries between individual and group peacebuilding dynamics. She argues that as people spoke indirectly of their conflict and post-conflict experiences, they did not reflect on them outside context. Economic, political, social, cultural, and ethnic concerns, tensions, and difficulties were intimately intertwined with their psychological trauma. Individual and collective healing and recovery were often found to be dependent upon the levels of power and agency attainable or available to them. In short, the resilience and creativity of conflict victims and survivors point to their political and social agency, and how they can work with or against externally imposed peacebuilding initiatives. Chapter 2 by Sandrine Lefranc, “A critique of ‘bottom-up’ peacebuilding: do peaceful individuals make peaceful societies?,” offers a sociological analysis of the people and organizations that promote dialogue-based, coexistence programs, conflict resolution training and other “bottom-up” peacebuilding techniques on the basis that these techniques will construct a peace that is more sustainable than those focused on political elites and institutional reforms. Lefranc's analysis focuses not on the programs’ results, but on the actors who promote them, thus revealing their sociopolitical and ideological origins and ambitions. More importantly, the analysis unveils these groups’ common assumption: an individualist and relationist conception of social change where the individual is conceived as the true agent of peace. Where this is put into practice as in “transitional justice” efforts, Lefranc argues, this understanding of peace depoliticizes the peacebuilding process and works to legitimize “top-down” institutional reform programs. Both chapters demonstrate the intricate ways in which so-called “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches are imbricated and the concrete effects that such a distinction can have of the possibility of peace.
The rest of the book is an ensemble of case studies which cover diverse situations – geographic, cultural, political, historical – and that analyse a variety of issues – trauma, memory, reconciliation, transitional justice, apology, and so on – related to peacebuilding. The chapters are organized thematically. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the question of reconciliation over generations and the associated politics of – national – memory. In Chapter 3, “Familial trauma in democratic Spain: memory and reconciliation through generations,” Lorraine Ryan analyses national reconciliation in the case of Spain since the Civil War and notably after the regime of General Franco. While the Spanish transition after Franco is usually heralded as a model of democratization, Ryan disputes this claim and argues that the imbrications of a flawed democratization process and a spurious reconciliation have led to the endurance of “Republican family trauma” through three generations. Ryan shows how the post-Franco Spanish governments’ policy of reconciliation, based on a “pact of oblivion” that asserted a narrative of equal responsibility for the Civil War, pre-empted the resolution of the trauma by silencing the particular experiences and identities of the “Republican family.” In the end, this silencing as a way to negotiate the past was counterproductive as the marginalized Republican memory and identity endured and reclaimed their voice and public place. In Chapter 4, “Living to tell the story: healing, social denial and redress in Uruguay,” Gabriela Fried Amilivia examines the relationship between healing, reconciliation, and the social dynamics of remembering and silencing. She does so by studying the traumatic memory of the political prisoners (“communist subversives”) of Uruguay's civic-military regime. As in the case of Spain, post-authoritarian Uruguayan governments grounded national reconciliation on transition policies that silenced and denied personal experiences of state terror and torture. What was excluded from public discourse and memory, however, survived in supportive social groups, but not without particular effects caused by the group inner dynamics, rules, and norms. For Fried Amilivia, these groups had a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, they worked to reproduce and save the memories of state terror and promoted a form of healing, but on the other hand they reinforced the inner-group identity in opposition to “others” in society – those who did not experience torture – thus compromising the prospects of national reconciliation. Chapters 3 and 4 suggest that marginalizing or silencing experiences and memories of trauma for the sake of national reconciliation is counterproductive as the political, social, and psychological effects of trauma do not disappear.
The following two chapters analyse the case of post-conflict Cambodia. In Chapter 5, “Justice, healing and reconciliation in Cambodia,” Julian Poluda, Judith Strasser, and Sotheara Chhim analyse the psychological impact of the judicial procedures and measures of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). They show that most victims and survivors of the genocide are dissatisfied with the Cambodian transitional justice model. With its emphasis being on prosecutorial mechanisms, the ECCC process itself has had little positive impact. However, where they were able to participate actively inside and outside the court's proceedings, psychological benefits were found as civil participants gained a better understanding of the circumstances that contributed to their victimization experiences and could link their individual memories to the formal court narrative. Chapter 6 by Angel Ryono, “Exploring the role of apology in Cambodia's reconciliation process,” analyses the role of apology in promoting or consolidating the reconciliation process in Cambodia. Based on semi-structured interviews with genocide survivors, Ryono argues that apology supported national reconciliation as a desired form of symbolic and moral reparation. Apology has played an increasingly significant role where reconciliation and healing are made more difficult by the fact that victims continue to live with those who participated in or committed Khmer Rouge crimes. For Ryono, the Cambodian context suggests that reconciliation will be defined in these direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. In Chapter 7, “Governmental apologies and political reconciliation: promise and pitfalls,” Graham Dodds further explores the question of apology in building peace and reconciliation, albeit in a quite different context. After a thorough overview of the academic debates about the role and importance of apology, he studies the case of Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. The example shows the difficulties involved in making a political apology effective, if only because words can hardly make up for atrocities. Nevertheless, a carefully executed and honest apology, according to Dodds, can be a potent means to promote reconciliation and peaceful relations.
Chapters 8 and 9 turn to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Chapter 8, “Co-creating Peace: confronting psycho-social-economic injustices in the Israeli-Palestinian context,” Julia Chaitin first discusses the “psychosocial factors” that drive and sustain the conflict and present significant obstacles to peace trajectories. These factors are deeply intertwined in intergenerational memories of the conflict, in opposing historical narratives, in competing victimhood status, and thus in deeply embedded “us-them” thinking. Despite such deep-rooted obstacles, Chaitin suggests ways to overcome them by examining the examples of two joint initiatives by organizations that seek to open up the dialogue and move beyond “us-them” thinking in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. David Senesh, in Chapter 9 “Restorative moments: from First Nations people in Canada to conflicts in an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group,” offers a unique perspective on peace-building, healing, and reconciliation. Senesh seeks a way out of the choice that is generally offered between Western ethnocentric practices that run the risk of performing oppressive psychological interventions and indigenous practices where socio-cultural diversity is romanticized and leads to abusive falsification of cultural differences. His strategy is “to re-contextualize restorative principles as encountered among First Nations in Canada within the arena of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” This strategy works to suggest a distinctive and refreshing re-examination of restorative principles and innovative ways for revitalizing mediating solutions.
The final two chapters come back to the question of how we can or should imagine and conceive peace, and how this working imagination is intimately tied to a philosophy or conception of history. In Chapter 10, “Towards peace and reconciliation after the Great War: letter-writing to the League of Nations,” Carl Bouchard presents a historian's perspective on peace and reconciliation. Based upon an analysis of citizens’ letters sent to the League of Nations after World War I, Bouchard examines, in a unique fashion, individual attitudes about peace in the interwar period. The letters do not shed light on a given reconciliation process, but “on a genuine grassroots discourse, universal in its scope, of which the LON is both the embodiment and the driving force.” One of the key insights that comes out of the analysis is the inherent tension between uniformity and diversity; that is, between the universal and the particular found in an imagination of peace that emphasizes the oneness and fraternity of humankind on the one hand, and yet also, on the other hand, the perceived need for standardized norms and rules to help men and women become aware of this oneness. In Chapter 11, “Can history heal trauma? the role of history education in reconciliation processes”, Karina Korostelina analyses the role of history education in forming social concepts and understandings that could contribute to reconciliation and peacebuilding processes. History education and textbooks can connect present and past circumstances, just as they can avoid discussions about trauma or reinforce “us-them” thinking. Korostelina studies notable projects in Southeastern Europe, Israel and Palestine, and the South Caucasian region – the Tbilisi Initiative between Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan – that seek to encourage reconciliation between societies that have a history of conflict. These projects of constructing parallel history narratives have shown encouraging results, despite various obstacles and the continuous competition from chauvinistic and nationalist narratives. Last but not least, we conclude the book with a brief discussion on how to make “bottom-up” approaches to peacebuilding relevant.
As policymakers and practitioners focus largely upon rebuilding economies and infrastructures, it is equally important to emphasize the human dimension in terms of (re)building lives. The social transformation necessary for long-term and sustainable peace is too complex to be understood by a single disciplinary lens because the issues involved traverse, among other fields, psychology, sociology and political science. What is much needed is an integration of “peace psychology,” broadly understood, to common policy analyses of peacebuilding. It is in this context that this book incorporates recent insights on healing and reconciliation with peacebuilding theory and practices, thus proposing a unique approach to social transformation.
Notes
1 As will be discussed below, one could mention social psychology as an exception where one finds the core literature on this topic, but a literature that has yet to be integrated with the perspectives found in political science and international relations.
2 We recognize that this distinction is somewhat caricatured, that some authors are more nuanced than others and that some works do not respect these “two groups.” The point remains that there is serious and significant division of labor based upon the discrimination between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches.
3 There is a parallel to draw here between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to peacebuilding. In the case of the former, and especially since the events of 11 September 2001, security is prioritized based on the logic that economic and political development is impossible without security, and that security without development is questionable. In this “security-development nexus,” policymakers and practitioners have enthusiastically embraced the idea that security and development are interdependent (Tschirgi et al. 2009), even to the point of associating – a specific understanding of – development with peace (Mac Ginty and Williams 2009), resulting in the transformation, according to Mark Duffield (2007), of development into a technique of security that first and foremost seeks to govern people. Herman's premise that safety is required for healing might sound like common sense, but it should not obscure the crucial – and political – questions of who should provide safety/security, how, and for whom and for what purpose. The ideas of security and protection have historically framed internationalist debates about conflict prevention, humanitarian aid, peace-keeping, and territorial administration, because they have been intimately tied to an understanding of political authority as grounded on the capacity to guarantee security and protection (see Orford 2011).
4 For detailed outline of each see Clancy and Hamber (2008).