Chapter 12
Conclusion
Making “bottom-up” peacebuilding relevant
How can the study of the psychology of trauma, healing, and reconciliation inform peacebuilding, the ways in which peace can be built and imagined, and the type of peace that ought to be possible or impossible? This book suggests a few places where one could start looking, research strategies on how to start asking productive questions, and methods to start finding provocative answers that go beyond the problematic distinction between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches.
The first two chapters interrogate the very distinction that is usually made between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches. Patricia Maulden examines it through the standpoint of the post-conflict survivor and society. Her analysis of the post-conflict situations in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Burundi emphasizes that all attempts at political reconciliation and at imagining the peace involve remembering and re-living the war and its associated sufferings and trauma. Sandrine Lefranc looks at the distinction from the point of view of the peace-builders who interpret their work as “bottom-up” alternatives to “top-down” initiatives. She demonstrates how the individualist assumptions guiding these peacebuilders can lead them to legitimize and depoliticize “top-down” peace-building processes.
Through the thorough analysis of the cases of Spain and Uruguay, Chapters 3 and 4 also show and suggest the risks in distinguishing the “top-down” from the “bottom-up.” In Chapter 3, Lorraine Ryan investigates the Spanish national reconciliation since the Civil War and notably after the General Franco regime. The resolution of the trauma was disregarded in favor of the perceived need for an expedient national reconciliation process, as defined by – and mostly for – the political elite. One of the key effects was the transmission of trauma through generations. In Chapter 4, Gabriela Fried Amilivia observes something very similar in Uruguay. While there was also a formal policy that prioritized national reconciliation to the detriment of trauma healing, Amilivia analyses how this sociopolitical silencing of trauma informed and influenced the behavior and cognition of state torture survivors, both individually and as members of a survivors-of-torture community. These two chapters highlight the risks in dismissing the serious effects of trauma for the sake of national reconciliation and peace and in discriminating between top-down and bottom-up processes.
In the next chapter, Julian Poluda, Judith Strasser, and Sotheara Chhim analyse the psychological impact of the judicial procedures and measures of the Cambodian transitional justice model. They argue that where Cambodians could participate actively inside and around the court's proceedings, various psychological benefits were observable. In Chapter 6, Angel Ryono examines the role of apology in promoting Cambodian reconciliation. While apology is a symbolic and moral form of reparation, it is also an acknowledgement of the victims’ suffering and trauma that can encourage and promote the agency of victims, thus opening the door for new peacebuilding and reconciliation opportunities. Graham Dodds, in Chapter 7, studies the question of apology and the specific case of Japanese American. While there are many difficulties in making an apology effective, he argues that an honest and well-executed one is a potent method of promoting reconciliation and peacebuilding. Among other things, these three chapters suggest that the official acknowledgement of trauma is tied to the recognition of the political agency of victims and survivors and as such to the possibilities of peacebuilding, healing, and reconciliation.
Chapters 8 and 9 analyse the psychosocial factors and the possibilities of healing and reconciliation through dialogue in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Julia Chaitin points to the ways in which psychosocial factors are deeply intertwined with intergenerational memories and narratives of the conflict. Peace trajectories encounter significant obstacles in polarizing and competing historical narratives of victimhood that dialogue seeks to overcome. In Chapter 9, David Senesh makes connections between restorative practices found among First Nations in Canada and the peace possibilities of Israeli–Palestinian dialogue. The comparison is an important analytical strategy to avoid the typical misleading choice that is presented as one between ethnocentric Western practices and romanticized indigenous ones. Both chapters provide significant insights into the possibilities and limits of peacebuilding through dialogue.
Although their starting points differ from each other and from the preceding chapters, the final two chapters come back to the relationship between peace and war as historical phenomena and peace and war as ideas and as imagined by individuals and communities. Carl Bouchard, in Chapter 10, examines a grassroots peace discourse that defines peace in universal terms, but its realization in particular – and Eurocentric – norms and rules that are conceived as necessary to bring about peace. In Chapter 11, Karina Korostelina connects the possibilities of peace to the writing and teaching of peace and war in history books. Both authors point to the importance of narratives about peace, conflict, and war in terms of the construction of possibilities, but also of obstacles, for peace and reconciliation.
Trauma, healing, reconciliation
Taken together, the chapters draw attention to how the psychology of trauma and the processes of peacebuilding, healing, and reconciliation are contingent, changing, non-linear and long-term. Both the traumatic process and the healing process vary from survivor to survivor depending upon the sequences of the traumatic experiences and/or upon the context one was exposed to (Keilson 1992). The traumatic event per se, even in war, is not the only or even a dependable predictor of subsequent trauma and other hardships. Even in the occasion of an intentional act of human violence, it is not necessarily followed by post-traumatic symptoms or by unalterable economic and social consequences. For instance, a survivor who coped relatively during the war, but who lives in a post-conflict context where fear of the “other” remains or where instability and insecurity are prevalent, is likely to present a more severe traumatic symptoms than another who might have gone through a greater traumatic experience during the conflict but subsequently lives in a better post-conflict situation. Janoff-Bulman (1992) argued that a complete recovery as if the atrocities never occurred is not possible. Others have suggested that conflict survivors can come to grips with a violent past and accept the post-conflict lingering “ambivalence” or “unfinished business” (Hamber 2009: 12) and can reach a “good enough” well-being (Winnicott 1971). However, many of this book's chapters demonstrate that such a “good enough” healing process does not occur in a social, economical or political vacuum, and that to national and/or international elites “good enough” means something different than to the majority of individuals and communities that have suffered trauma.
Scholars have identified several dimensions of reconciliation that largely overlap with those of the healing process: the need for security or peace, the building of new relationships, expressions of regard towards the other, the search or need for the truth, some form of justice, and mercy or forgiveness (Kriesberg 1997 and 2007; Lederach 1997; Long and Brecke 2003). Kelman (2008) and Green (2009) integrated a number of these dimensions into stages of the reconciliation process, thus suggesting a progression to follow towards reconciliation and a set of conditions to be met for reconciliation to occur. Reconciliation is not so much an outcome to reach, but rather a sociopolitical and psychosocial process through which antagonist parties are supposed to acknowledge each other's sufferings, each party is to move onto constructive attitudes and behaviors, and/or individual and collective relationships of trust are (re)built (Brounéus 2003; de la Rey 2001; Kriesberg 1998). Reconciliation, therefore, includes a significant psychological dimension that entails “a changed psychological orientation toward the other” (Staub 2006: 870). Antagonists must overcome perceptions, cognitions, and feelings of enmity that are often based upon traumatic war experiences and/or upon powerful representational practices that have demonized and dehumanized the “other.” According to Herman (1997), transforming one's psychological orientation towards the other cannot occur without an ambivalent amount of individual and social healing.
Moreover, the healing process can be delayed or blocked by “secondary victimization” that can come from and affect the reconciliation process. In the field of victimology, a stress that exacerbates the victim's traumatic condition after the initial victimization constitutes a source of “secondary victimization.” Any action that harms the victim further physically, psychologically, economically, or socially constitutes a source of secondary victimization. The poor treatment of victims within the criminal justice system is an example of secondary victimization (Pointing and Maguire 1988). Post-conflict difficulties can constitute or add to secondary victimization: continuing violence, widespread socio-economic problems and inequalities, a reconciliation process that is not perceived as fair or as promoting peace and justice, the absence or lack of reparations and justice, the lack of general information concerning the circumstances of one's victimization, and so on (see other chapters and Parent 2011). In short, the complexity of the development of the post-conflict trauma can be amplified by peacebuilding initiatives and their effects. As our chapters suggest, the creation of a sustainable peace will not happen and the positive effects of peacebuilding activities will be limited, if not harmful, if most survivors are excluded or perceive themselves to be excluded from peacebuilding. As Drož
ek (2010:14) wrote:
‘Healing’ does not work when imposed, and internal motivation is crucial for success. Urge for a change must come from ‘inside’ and should not be forced on from ‘outside’, because unwanted rapid changes can lead to tensions and result in defensive reactions.
Transformation imposed from above or outside, whether from the “international community,” NGOs or other international organizations, or from national governments will usually be perceived as benefiting the interests of the powerful.
Where trauma and hardships become worse, deeper and more complicated, the conditions can breed future violence and conflict or, certainly, increase significantly the difficulties involved in acknowledging the sufferings of the “other,” the old enemy, or the perpetrator of crimes and atrocities. Any sort of re-orientation towards the “other” becomes less likely to occur (see Parent 2010). This is not a claim that the study of trauma and healing will give all the answers to building peace or will suggest the kinds of peace that ought to be possible. This book clearly shows that the psychological dimension constitutes – or should constitute – a vital component of any peace trajectory, which is obviously not a particularly original claim. One of the things that this book does well, however, is to demonstrate how ignoring or denying individual and collective trauma and sufferings will not make them disappear even after generations, and how this affects and is affected by peacebuilding and reconciliation potentials. As Drožek (2010: 14) writes, peacebuilders should not forget that “a survivor remains revengeful as long as he or she feels powerless. Therefore, policy makers should be very careful when advocating reconciliation as the universal paradigm of collective ‘healing’ and reparation of the canvas of a hurt society.”
Watkins and Shulman contend that the Liberation Psychology movement, associated with Ignacio Martìn-Baró, may offer an interesting avenue for further research on peacebuilding initiatives. According to them, psychology can be a tool for liberation where “a profound re-orientation of psychological practice through which yesterday's universalizing ‘experts’ begin to learn from organic histories with local participants” (Watkins and Shulman 2008: 27). Here, survivors would have a “meaningful voice” and be considered within a “wider web of relationships” where importance would be given to “forgotten contexts” such as the community, culture, history and environment (Watkins and Shulman 2008: 26, 37). The chapters in this book have also proposed ways and research strategies to hear unheard voices, see forgotten relationships and contexts, and thus make peacebuilding relevant to those who lived through the conflict. In any case, what comes clearly out of this book's chapters is that peace and reconciliation are unlikely events where and when the subjects of peacebuilding are not recognized as actors and perceived as spectators to peace processes. This assumption about the passivity of victims and survivors of war is implicit in the distinction made between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to peacebuilding. This discrimination between approaches obscures the central claim that this book seeks to support: that peacebuilding initiatives ought to be first and foremost for and about, and are sustainable and meaningful only through the active participation of those that lived through conflict.