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Research shows that war affects various groups of survivors differently, yet the severe consequences faced by war widows are often overlooked. Combining insights from fieldwork in Sri Lanka with secondary sources, we conclude that the time is ripe for the daunting challenges of war widows to be brought into the limelight. We argue that widowhood after war is conditioned both by the post-war context and society’s gendered constructions. The social expectations that follow pose exceptional trials in everyday life for war widows globally. As an important case and illustrative example, we analyse Sri Lanka: a decade ago emerging from civil war; today, in dire need of economic and political transformation. We demonstrate how war widows are caught in the crossfire of demographic change, post-war insecurities, economic hardship, and gender discriminating norms and traditions. This unseen group of survivors play a critical role for the prospects for economic, social and political development in the transition from war to peace, in Sri Lanka and beyond. We conclude by calling for a concerted effort wherein research and policy come together to outline a new research and policy agenda with the aim of lessening the burden of war widows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We performed a meta-analysis and systematic review on elderly survivors of war suffering from PTSD to estimate the variability in their cognitive impairment based on individual neuropsychological tests. Methods: We included case control studies that explored the association of cognitive deficits in elderly PTSD civilian survivor of wars (age >60 years), using MEDLINE, Embase and PsycINFO from the inception to January 2018. We compared the cognitive performances in three comparisons i) PTSD+ vs. PTSD- civilian survivors of war; ii) PTSD+ vs. Control and iii) PTSD- vs. Control. The risk of bias was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for case-control studies. Results: Out of 2939 titles and abstracts, 13 studies were eligible for data extraction. As compared to PTSD- civilian survivors of war, PTSD+ civilian survivors of war demonstrated significant deficits on TMT-A, TMT-B, Digit span backward, explicit memory low pair associate, CVLT recognition, WAIS- verbal and nonverbal tests. As compared to health controls, PTSD+ survivors demonstrated significantly lower performance on explicit memory low pair and high associate, RAVLT immediate and delayed recall, CVLT delayed and short cued recall. Performance on the neuropsychological test between PTSD- survivors of war and controls was not significant for all tests. Conclusion: The pattern suggests that PTSD+ survivors of war had poorer performance in tasks requiring processing speed, executive function, attention, working memory and learning. The magnitude of the cognitive deficits in our pooled analysis was small to moderate depending on the neuropsychological test. Most of our pooled analysis suffered from a high risk of bias, which lowered the confidence in our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]