Survivors Of Conflict Research Articles

International Criminal Justice and the Empowerment or Disempowerment of Victims

This chapter examines ways in which international criminal justice processes may empower or disempower victims in their pursuit of justice. Critical scholars often argue that international criminal tribunals de-politicize, render passive, or otherwise disempower victims as agents of justice. Concerns about the powerlessness or disempowerment of victims in international criminal justice processes are central to debates about whether international criminal justice does in fact advance ‘justice for victims.’ Based on focus group discussions and interviews with survivors of conflict and international crimes in Kenya and Uganda, I argue that neither the laudatory nor critical positions in this debate capture the very complex and variegated effects of international criminal justice processes on victims. I develop this argument in four sections. Section One explains how issues of victim empowerment and disempowerment have been addressed in literature on the field of international criminal justice (ICJ). Section Two describes my approach to research conducted with survivors of violence in Kenya and Uganda. Section Three summarizes this research and identifies key aspirations, concerns, and judgements regarding empowerment and disempowerment by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Section Four analyzes these findings and argues that international criminal justice processes do not simply empower or disempower victims. Instead, tribunals are selective about who receives victim status, they channel people’s agency in particular ways, and their impact is highly context-dependent. As a result, victim status is not simply empowering or disempowering — it enhances the agency of some people in some contexts to pursue some justice aims, but it can also pose serious risks and constraints. The concluding section sketches some implications of this framework for understanding the power of international criminal justice, and for evaluating the capacity of international criminal tribunals to advance justice for victims.

Measuring Depression in a Non-Western War-Affected Displaced Population: Measurement Equivalence of the Beck Depression Inventory.

Depression is commonly seen in survivors of conflict and disaster across the world. There is a dearth of research on the validity of commonly used measures of depression in these populations. Measurements of depression that are used in multiple contexts need to meet measurement equivalence, i.e., the instrument measures the same construct in the same manner across different groups. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was administered to female trauma survivors in the United States (n = 268) and female survivors of war in Sri Lanka (n = 149). Three metrics of measurement equivalence—structural, metric, and scalar—were examined. Two- and three-factor structures of the BDI that have been identified in other populations did not provide a good fit for our data. However, a bifactor model revealed a similar general distress dimension across populations, but dissimilar secondary dimensions or subfactors. The Sri Lankan subfactor comprised of predominantly somatic symptoms and the United States subfactor comprised of cognitive and somatic symptoms. While intercepts of individual BDI items differed, their differences seem to be offsetting. Total BDI scores across these two populations are roughly comparable, although caution is recommended when interpreting them. Making comparisons on subscales is not recommended.

Conflict, Livelihood Security and Children in the Conflict Affected Kokrajhar District BTAD, Assam

<div><p><em>This paper is an attempt to investigate into the livelihood insecurity of the people living in conflict prone areas and its resultant impact on the overall wellbeing of the children of the area. It focuses mainly on two communities in Kokrajhar district of Assam i.e. the Bodos and the immigrant Muslims which have experienced series of conflicts in the recent decades. Generally the first priority in conflict prone areas is the immediate concern of the Government and Non Government actors is focused on the immediate loss of life and property. The sufferings of the survivors of conflict however go unnoticed. The survivors are the worst victim of conflict. The conflicts have led to mass displacement of people from both the communities forcing them to leave their homes and to live in makeshift camps. The victims living in the camps are deprived of basic human right to life and livelihood. Many of them are living in the relief camps for more than a decade, with no scope for education and skill development for getting a dignified livelihood opportunity. Even those who are not displaced or have returned to their villages lost their livelihood due to the breakdown of the civil infrastructure. The livelihood insecurity of the parents lead to serious child right violation in the conflict affected area. Several unwelcome consequences like child trafficking, child marriage, child labour can be seen in the area. this paper tries to capture the actual picture from the study area.</em></p></div>

Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock Philip Holden (bio) Gillian Whitlock. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford UP, 2015, 284 pp. ISBN 978-0199560622, $31.95. Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions in the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series brings together two approaches to literary studies that have met different fates over the last decade. Interest in all forms of life writing has grown, especially in a present global politics in which issues of referentiality, "fake news," and truth-telling become ever more urgently debated. Postcolonial studies as a conceptual framework has, in contrast, waned, and been partially eclipsed by a growing if parallel focus on world literature and translation studies. Given these developments, and indeed the potential limitlessness of post-colonial life writing as a topic, Whitlock makes a number of strategic decisions. She focuses on prose and filmic narratives and, as her subtitle indicates, the question of testimony, reading a series of texts that testify, or that are made to testify, through the lens of postcolonial criticism and theory. Particularly welcome is Whitlock's stress on contexts of activism and dissemination, including paratexts, and her detailed exploration of the transactional nature of life narratives and the affective responses they solicit from audiences. Whitlock consciously opposes the term "life narrative" to "autobiography," which she sees as associated with "western Enlightenment values," in order to pay attention to different genres of life writing—"for example the slave narrative, women's journals and diaries, letters, memoirs, biographies" (3)—that offer other insights into subjectification. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Whitlock is careful to analyze and critique the economies of affect in which such texts participate, while also holding out the hope that such narratives of testimony will "return to the legacy of humanism and continue to invest in its promise, even as they register the limits of its currency and value" (204). Whitlock's choice of texts for analysis is perhaps more contentious. Postcolonial Life Narratives is divided into two sections. The first, entitled "Colonial Testimonial, 1789–1852," consists of six very short chapters, each exploring a single text or a pair of narratives from the period in question. Published narratives that are now canonical have good representation: Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative, Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, and Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush. They are supplemented with, and sometimes juxtaposed to, texts that have a more complex history of genesis and reception—the "Hottentot Venus" Sara (Saartjie) Bartman's testimony, for example, or Woollarawarre Bennelong's letter, the earliest surviving example of writing by an Australian Aboriginal author disseminated in English. The final chapter of this section, entitled "Proximate Reading," elaborates on [End Page 524] the critical method developed in these short chapters and its inspiration: testimony itself as expressed in "postcolonial narratives that emerged alongside the autobiographical narratives of 'the Western self' and entangled with it, drawing on shared ideoscapes of Enlightenment humanism" (68–69, emphasis in original). The second section of Postcolonial Life Narratives consists of four more substantial chapters. A discussion of life writing emerging from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa covers texts by Antjie Krog, Zoë Wicomb, and J. M. Coetzee, ultimately focusing on the coauthored text There Was This Goat that explores the way in which the testimony of one of the mothers of a victim of apartheid remains stubbornly unassimilable to the TRC's goals of healing and reconciliation. This is followed by, for me, the most thoughtful chapter in Whitlock's study, which engages in proximate reading to discuss how rape warfare is emplaced within humanitarian narratives through bringing together two moments of life writing that occupy proximate geographical sites. Accounts of survivors of conflict and genocide in the conflict zone on the borders of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are thus juxtaposed with the proliferation of life writing around Dian Fossey, the "gorilla girl" whose own life stories of encounters with primates in Rwanda contain partially erased traces of gendered violence. Particularly powerful here are Whitlock's close readings of Lisa F. Jackson's documentary film The...

Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia

ABSTRACTPost-conflict interventions to ‘deal with’ violent pasts have moved from exception to global norm. Early efforts to achieve peace and justice were critiqued as ‘gender-blind’—for failing to address sexual and gender-based violence, and neglecting the gender-specific interests and needs of women in transitional settings. The advent of UN Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ provided a key policy framework for integrating both women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite this, gender justice and equality in (post-)conflict settings remain largely unachieved. This article explores efforts to attain gender-just peace in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It critically examines the significance of a recent ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project—the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia—as a locally engaged approach to achieving justice and redress for women impacted by armed conflict. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with women activists, the article evaluates the successes and shortcomings of responding to gendered forms of wartime violence through truth-telling. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the article advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognizing women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialize before, during, and after conflict.

Promoting Accountability for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Against Men: A Comparative Legal Analysis of International and Domestic Laws Relating to IDP and Refugee Men in Uganda

This paper reflects an innovative collaboration between the Refugee Law Project and the International Human Rights Law Clinic, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. It addresses an issue of growing concern to gender activists, human rights and humanitarian actors, as well as governments, namely: what legal remedies are available to male survivors of conflict- related sexual violence? Are such remedies to be found within the domestic or the international sphere? Are they best addressed as human rights violations? Through war crimes tribunals? Or through a combination of transitional justice measures? Are the same remedies available to all victims, or are refugees treated differently from IDPs or citizens?Through careful review of existing legislation, as well as existing precedents, this paper establishes that in principle, at least, international criminal justice offers the best prospects of redress, but that this potential has been seriously underutilized in nearly all cases to date. This paper thus serves as a wake-up call to those concerned with justice for survivors of sexual violence, and, using Uganda as a case study, lays the groundwork upon which to generate a legal reform agenda internationally. An earlier draft, prepared by Clinic students from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law under the supervision of Professor Laurel E. Fletcher in collaboration with Dr. Chris Dolan, and with further advice from Stephen Oola, was discussed at a legal round-table in Kampala in April 2013, and this version reflects key comments and suggestions that were made on that occasion.

Hacia un currículo para la formación política y la construcción de paces en Colombia

En este escrito se realiza una apuesta teórica para plantear los fundamentos que se deben tener en cuenta en la estructuración de una propuesta de currículo que propenda por la formación política y la construcción de paces en Colombia. Inicialmente se analizan las diferencias conceptuales que existen entre las teorías del currículo y los discursos sobre el currículo, con el fin de determinar cuál de los dos caminos resulta más apropiado para alcanzar el propósito antes planteado. Luego, se hace una crítica a la manera convencional de estructurar los currículos desde los poderes hegemónicos y se resalta la importancia de vincular las experiencias de los sobrevivientes del conflicto interno armado en la estructuración de propuestas de currículo para la formación política y la construcción de paces, como un aporte que permite potenciar el desarrollo legal y curricular propuesto por el gobierno nacional para la llamada Cátedra de la Paz.

Ten years of peace, bravery and resilience in Aceh

The date 15 August 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of the Helsinki Peace Agreement, which ended a major thirty‐year conflict between the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia. In this article I argue that much greater acknowledgement should be given to the creative responses that ordinary conflict survivors have brought to the process of post‐conflict social recovery. The article briefly discusses some observations on resilience made through 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Acehnese conflict survivors. I conclude that while Acehnese resilience is impressive, there remains a need for greater recognition of the experiences of conflict survivors, both to support justice for survivors and to enable a deeper understanding of ongoing political complexities in Aceh.

Humanitarian Work Using EMDR in Palestine and the Arab World

Humanitarian outreach is a significant part of the practice of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. The development of training in Arabic and provision of EMDR in areas of ongoing conflict including Palestine, Libya, Syria, and Iraq is described, and brief accounts of clients and therapists illustrate the help that EMDR has brought to survivors of conflict, imprisonment, and torture. Three clients, each with a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder, are briefly presented here: one from a refugee camp in Palestine, one from a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, and the other from a war zone in Libya.

Two solitudes: post‐tsunami and post‐conflict Aceh

In August 2005, after the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean Basin, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the cessation of hostilities was signed by Aceh's longstanding adversaries-the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). The tsunami was a major catalyst for 'disaster diplomacy'-international political pressure, which, this paper argues, was an important ingredient in creating conditions for the MoU, although the situation within Aceh also shaped the peace process. Based on interviews conducted in 2006 and 2007 with government officials, GAM representatives and fighters, and non-governmental organization staff in Aceh, this paper finds that assistance for tsunami survivors far exceeds that available for conflict survivors and ex-combatants. The formation of these two solitudes-the tsunami-affected and the conflict-affected-compounds challenges for sustaining peace in Aceh. This research points to an enduring lack of livelihoods for former fighters and conflict victims that may threaten a sustainable peace.

Views, events, and debates

Stronger women, stronger nations: 2008 Afghanistan Survey Brita Fernandez Schmidt In the March 2009 issue of G&D, we profiled Women for Women International, an NGO which works with women survivors of conflict to rebuild their lives and their communities in countries which have suffered, or are still suffering, violence and civil unrest. Here, Brita Fernandez Schmidt, Director of Operations for WfWI UK, reports on recent WfWI research in Afghanistan, which aimed to uncover, and give voice to, the views of Afghan women on the future of their troubled country. Gender and protection: where are the men? Rachel Hastie The protection of civilians, particularly women and children, is something that has been the focus of increasing attention from agencies carrying out humanitarian work in many of the world's trouble spots. For Rachel Hastie, who works on protection issues for Oxfam GB, practising a truly gendered approach to protection means re-examining our commonly held beliefs about women and men in times of conflict so as to better understand, and help alleviate, the suffering of those caught up in violence and war. CSW 53 – A Report Fiona Gell and Daniela Rosche Every year in March, around the time of International Women's Day, thousands of delegates from governments and civil society organisations from around the world converge on New York to attend the UN's annual Commission on the Status of Women meeting. Here, two members from Oxfam International's 2009 delegation explain what happens at the CSW, and what was achieved this year.

Rebuilding lives, healing minds

could have been a birthday party, but it was a play therapy session in one of Gaza City's schools. a of six-year-olds played on a huge canvas on the ground, grabbing multi-coloured balloons and popping them, not all of them were squealing with delight. One child, Omar, clapped his hands over his ears. The blasts reminded him of recent explosions in Gaza City. Omar said he does not go to school unless his mother is with him and holds his hand. And he doesn't feel secure if his teacher isn't around. Omar and others in Gaza are involved in play, art and music therapy in their schools as part of efforts by psychologists, teachers and community workers to help them cope with having lived through Israel's three-week offensive launched on 27 December 2008 and its aftermath. One such programme, implemented by Gaza psychologist Fadel Abu Hein at the Zahwa Rosary Catholic School, helps children express the anxiety, anger and fear they felt over the loss of family members and the destruction of their homes. Most of the children cry when they hear an explosion or any loud noise. Many are bedwetting. They bite their nails or have nervous twitches. They become afraid, especially at night, he said. The World Health Organization (WHO) has worked with the Palestinian ministry of health and community-based organizations since 2002 to improve mental health services in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. A recent WHO assessment of Gaza views children and adolescents as a particularly at-risk group for the psychosocial consequences they may face during and after the crisis. Tens of thousands of people were displaced. Children's play areas became littered with crushed concrete and debris. Some children and adults were permanently disabled. WHO estimates that between 70% and 75% of a population develop mild to moderate post-traumatic reactions after a large-scale crisis, such as the one in Gaza, while it estimates that 5% to 10% of people in Gaza may need professional mental health support to address more long-term problems, such as depression, trauma, anxiety and panic attacks. About 1300 people died and more than 5000 were injured in Israel's military offensive in the coastal strip. Children made up about one-third of these casualties. Israel said the attacks were necessary to stop the militant Hamas, who rule Gaza, from firing rockets into southern Israel. Many in Gaza said they were deeply affected by the attack. Nowhere in Gaza was safe, said Abu Hein, who heads the Community Training and Crisis Management Center in Gaza City. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When you see your family killed in front of you and you're unable to save them, it's a big shock, said 12-year-old Almaza al-Sammouri, as she and her classmates drew pictures during a therapy session at the An-Jalout Islamic Girls School in Gaza City. found them piled on each other. Some were dead. Others died a little later because we couldn't get an ambulance, al-Sammouri said of the airstrike that killed her mother, four siblings and several uncles. It was a huge shock. I couldn't move or do anything. want to become a first-aid nurse because if this happens again, I would be able to treat them so they wouldn't die, al-Sammouri said. The mental health needs of such survivors of conflicts and other disasters have come under the spotlight of late. New guidelines were adopted last September by WHO along with other UN organizations and their nongovernmental organization (NGO) partners to include mental health and psychosocial support as part of their emergency response. In a statement, these groups underscored the need to coordinate multiple agencies offering such support and, while doing so, to ensure that the affected populations are not overwhelmed by outsiders and local contributions to mental health and psychosocial support are not easily marginalized or undermined. …

Violence and the Body: Somatic Expressions of Trauma and Vulnerability during War

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted along the Sierra Leone-Guinea border during wartime, this article explores the contested nature of the body and bodily illness during times of spectacular political violence. For both perpetrators and survivors of conflict, the body and bodily illness became tools over which each sought to control definitions of Self and identity. Finally, the article considers emic interpretations and contested meanings of the local illness hypertension, or haypatensi, that occurred among the displaced. I document how discussions of haypatensi allowed horrific subjective experiences to become mediated, enabling conflict survivors to understand and express the pain of their trauma and vulnerability, and begin recourse toward reestablishing order and control over their lives. Even these discussions of illness, however, involved competition over control of meanings and prescriptive models with medical practitioners. Haypatensi thus reveals how lived, traumatic experiences and their cultural representations within illness are linked.

Rebuilding an Inclusive Political Community After War

This article argues that the central need in a society in the aftermath of violent conflict is to rebuild the state’s representation function, which should be constructed around an inclusive political and civic community. This inclusive community must overcome the fragmentation of society that occurs or is exacerbated during war, and view all community members as survivors of conflict. The main means of pursuing reconciliation in post-conflict societies has been through measures of ‘transitional justice’, primarily trials or truth commissions. However, this article argues that these transitional justice measures, while fulfilling certain needs and accruing some benefits, do not necessarily fulfil the specific need of delivering reconciliation or helping to rebuild inclusive societies. Instead, these measures could, paradoxically, deepen divisions within society. A new paradigm of ‘reparative justice’ is thus proposed as part of a comprehensive alternative, within the framework of a critical approach to post-conflict peacebuilding (PCPB), that would facilitate the reconstruction of an inclusive political and civic community while pursuing the objectives of justice and reconciliation.