Engaging Traumatized Communities in Village Stability Operations

The practitioners of village stability operations operate nearly entirely in the spaces of communities damaged by combinations of traumatizing violence, loss, displacement, starvation, death and dismemberment. Their organization, equipping and training is focused on the most apparent physical security and developmental needs by those who fund and support their deployments and to a lesser extent on reparation of political dialogue as part of restorative justice and the reparative process. The psychological and sociological damage that these practitioners encounter however, often leads to frustration, overextension of personnel and resources and eventual failure. This paper explores the existence, nature and depth of psychological and sociological damage to communities traumatized by violent conflict. The purpose of this research is to establish a baseline of psychosocial-cultural intelligence on conflict societies that can be used to plan, prepare and execute peace operations and humanitarian missions. This psychosocial-cultural intelligence or understanding of traumatized communities provides peace operations and humanitarian missions with analysis and method to engage and influence traumatized communities to the point that they are able to provide for their self-sustainment without participation in communal violence. By exposing the pathology of sociological trauma at the micro, exo and macro levels of structure, we can begin to unwind and resolve intractable conflicts in failing and failed societies despite limited time and resource of peace operations donors and practitioners. Author Photo: Pillaging and Burning of um-Zeifa, Southern Darfur Sudan December 12th, 2004 The Challenge of Stabilizing Villages and Tribes in Conflict “Learning how to succeed in these missions is one of the greatest challenges of the century” (USIP/USA PKSOI, 2009, p. 1.3) International humanitarian and military operations in failing, failed, and war-torn states continue to face protracted difficulties despite the past decade’s experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa (Center for Global Development, 2007). In 2009, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) crafted a supplement to the U.S. Army’s manuals [i] that train field practitioners and planners in peacekeeping, humanitarian and stability operations and counterinsurgency. The USIP/PKSOI Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction manual (2009) was developed in order to offer a civilian perspective on reconstruction and stabilization operations. This combined effort failed to provide the field practitioner much assistance beyond the theoretical understanding of counterinsurgency or stabilization. Neither the military practitioner’s preoccupation with physical security, nor the civilian specialist’s focus on human development, targets the most acute and dangerous symptoms of unstable conflict zones. Together, the current program analysis of US missions in violent conflict zones remains focused on needs assessments, often on physical infrastructure conducted by practitioners whose frame of reference is based on dense, technologically advanced societies (Derleth & Alexander, 2011). Collectively, military-civilian practitioners of peace operations, counterinsurgency and humanitarian missions[ii] overlay physical security and needs assessments onto populations whose sociological structure has been damaged or even destroyed by severe and extended trauma; with results that have been less than satisfactory and far greater in cost than anticipated. This paper attempts to illustrate one primary area of programming, training, and execution that Humanitarian, Peacekeeping & Stability Operations misses when operating in violent, unstable conflict zones: the engagement of traumatized communities. There is a great deal of research and literature relating to the political and economic dynamics of civil war (Fearon & Laitin, 2003) (Fukuyama, 2004) (Kaufman, 2006) (Krasner, 2004) (Spears, 2010) (Stewart, 2008) (Weinstein, 2007). What is missing however, are corresponding “studies on the psychological effects of the civil war on the combatants on both sides” and the participants caught in the middle (Odejide, et al., 1998, p. 378). The damaged condition of the population in unstable conflict zones normally presents obstacles that limit the interventionists’ ability to match success in the field with the amount of effort and donor dollars processed. There are many reasons for the tremendous costs incurred for such low levels of success in stabilizing the levels of violence. One reason involves attempts by programmers, planners and executers to project developmental needs based assessments as a primary methodology of reducing instability. In doing so, they fail to identify local sources of instability relevant to the situation confronting them: Effective stability operations programming requires a methodology focused on identifying and diminishing any local sources of instability, [sic] not addressing the perceived needs of the population. Most developing countries have myriad needs. Extremists/insurgents do not usually build roads, provide health care, or dig wells. Yet they are able to gain support in the population. How? Extremists/insurgents are able to ameliorate the priority grievances of the population because they understand the local community (Derleth & Alexander, 2011, p. 125). Perhaps the single most immediate priority grievance of populations in the midst of an unstable, violent communal social structure is their inability to manage or ameliorate social trauma and a correlate inability to halt the disintegration of sociological structures that define their existential reality. The military-civilian practitioner’s focus on disarmament and reconstruction of physical infrastructure can be likened to constructing a hospital around a dying patient while never treating their disease or injury. Is the reconstruction of physical infrastructure an important part of post conflict restoration of damaged communities? Of course, but dead patients have little use for infrastructure; not just the physically dead, but the psychologically dead. The former expire from exsanguinations of their untreated wounds. The latter expire from extended trauma to the sociological structures that harbor the identities, psychological constructions and emotional expressions of their existential reality. This becomes what military practitioners call a ‘single point of failure’ in operational terminology. This concept provides that every new layer of physical security and developmental needs that are introduced into the conflict society will fail to restore social order and initiate a reparative process because of the underlying instability of the sociological structure itself; damaged as it is from extended and severe trauma: Trauma destroys the primary existential basic conditions: death, loneliness, meaninglessness, and liberty. Based on his observations on survivors from Hiroshima, [Lifton and Olsen] describe these disorders as loss of the capacity to feel and to be engaged in the outside world, and as various expressions of ‘the death imprint,’ the guilt over survival,’ and ‘psychic numbing’ (Elsass, 1997, p. 55). To explain the relationship of trauma to peace operations and humanitarian missions, we need to think about social trauma through the descriptive lens of physical trauma from where the term was drawn. Medical science uses physical trauma as a condition or category of injury that covers a wide range of wounds, fractures, breakages, and decapitations of limbs. Major trauma is defined using an injury severity score greater than 15 and can present secondary complications such as hemorrhaging, circulatory collapse, respiratory failure, and physical death (Søreide, 2009). Similarly, in psychology, trauma is a category or condition of injury to the psyche or psychological structure of one person or a related community of people (Elsass, 1997). In this category of trauma, the injury or wound occurs in the form of a reaction by the person or community to a penetration, destabilization, or destruction of their protective psychological structures (Herman, 1992). Called defenses, these structures shield, organize, and maintain a community’s psychic integration within and between individual members, their environment, and with those that populate their group identity and reality (Freud, 1936 (1946)). The reaction-traumatic wound for a normal, healthy human community usually arrives in the form of an external event[iii] foisted on its members such as torture, extended famine, large scale violence involving physical trauma and death of loved ones[iv] and related community members (Erikson, 1959) (Herman, 1992). The psychological sociological trauma that accompanies events of physical damage is the primary danger to the physical survival of the afflicted community. The physical damage only serves as the outward manifestations of inner damage: Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. [Traumatic events] undermine belief systems that give meaning to human experience. They violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a state of existential crises (Herman, 1992,