War Trauma and Mass Violence: Culture, Care and Coping in Southeast Asia

The workshop aims to contribute to a new fresh view on trauma resulted from warfare and mass violence by going beyond the dominant psychiatric perspective. We approach trauma as a culturally specific manifestation. Geographically, our focus and expertise on Southeast Asia, including by scholars from the region itself, allows us to decentre approaches to trauma based on Euro-American historical experiences and Western psychiatry. From the 1970s, the term “war trauma” made its appearance due to the social-psychological problems that American Vietnam veterans experienced after returning to society. War trauma became synonymous with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and the term became fashionable worldwide within a few decades. Contrary to the meaning of the term in psychiatry, our notion offers a culturally and socially sensitive approach to war trauma. Whereas (clinical) psychiatry focuses on the individual, on diagnostics and therapeutic intervention, from a cultural-historical perspective, war trauma is considered a social phenomenon borne and contested by groups in society.

Bringing together senior and junior scholars, with research expertise on warfare, trauma, and social healing in Europe and Asia, the workshop has three goals:

1. To rethink the conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of trauma resulted from warfare and mass violence;
2. To connect scholars working on European history with those working on Asia to develop common concepts and methodologies to study trauma culture from a cross-cultural comparative perspective, combining expertise from the fields of anthropology, political science, psychology and history;
3. To explore the possibilities for joint, interdisciplinary research, including identifying potential empirical case studies that allow for cross-cultural comparison; and
4. To investigate the possibilities to work towards a larger cooperative research program and to identify potential partners and funding opportunities.

We will produce a joint working paper based on the workshop’s conclusions, to be published in a peer-reviewed academic venue, as well as other more public-facing materials (e.g., a short essay, podcast episode). These publications will highlight the findings/conversations from the workshop, invite engagement from the wider scholarly and practice communities, and establish the agenda for a larger research network and program.

The conveners have worked on the topic of war trauma in various direct and indirect ways. Dr. Peter Keppy (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Netherlands) has worked on restitution and material war damage compensation in Indonesia and the Philippines and on the reintegration of ex-combatants into post-conflict African and Southeast Asian societies, and has conducted fieldwork in Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore. His work for the Dutch War Pension Board is directly related to issues of victimhood, war trauma and compensation. Dr. Dat Nguyen (NIOD) has been researching the role of religion in social healing and political reconciliation in post-war Vietnam. Dr. Ville Kivimäki (Tampere University, Finland) has studied traumatic experiences and trauma communities in various European historical contexts. Dr. Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson (University of California, Los Angeles and the Foundation for Pyschocultural Research, United States) specialises in the study of political violence, trauma, sacrifice, ritual, and resiliency in Burma/Myanmar and Southeast Asia. The conveners come from various disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, history, and cultural psychology.