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Studying the nature of trauma and how it affects individuals, societies, and groups is a complex and challenging undertaking. The majority of research on trauma comes from a psychological approach, although scholars in sociology, social psychology, and anthropology have also begun to explore the issue. In the this paper the author briefly explores the sources and dynamics of trauma as according to several social science disciplines. Then he focuses on the need for conflict resolution theorists and practitioners to address trauma related issues in their work. All too often, conflict resolvers working in deep-rooted conflicts, fail to recognize the severity of trauma that many parties have suffered in the hopes of negotiating a solution to a conflict or rushing to undertake reconciliation. This failure to adequately acknowledge the suffering that parties experience and the effect it has on populations can lead to future conflicts and continued suffering. Moreover the author examines how conflict resolution practitioners can be affected by burnout and secondary trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence and trauma are endemic in our world today, and affect us all. This paper examines the effect of trauma on our body, brain, spirit and relationships. It addresses multiple levels of trauma: individual, communal, and societal. It describes the ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political violence wounds not only individuals, but also the relationships and social networks that connect them. While individual experiences in wartime have been studied extensively, the impact of violence on social life is far less understood. How do individuals, groups, and organizations experience life in a traumatized community? How do traumatic experiences shape community members? perceptions and behaviors? What processes of solidarity and exclusion operate within and between groups during and after episodes of political violence? How do these processes shape healing, retraumatization, and/or renewed conflict? What norms guide behavior within traumatized communities? How do these norms shape the identities, interests, and expectations of traumatized individuals and communities? How do traumatized individuals and communities shape the nature and evolution of norms? My paper addresses these questions by describing and comparing the experiences of communities recovering from political violence in Gujarat, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. My ethnographic study offers a descriptive portrait of the culture of trauma in a small number of communities; cross-case analysis reveals patterns and commonalities across cases, as well as important differences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will describe an attempt by several scholars based at small liberal arts colleges to engage in interdisciplinary research and introduce innovative teaching methods in IS courses. The research question explored by our project (traumatic memory and empowerment in transitional societies) is rarely asked by IS scholars. At the same time, traumatic memory has been a focus of numerous studies in social history and psychology. These studies suggest that the collective memory of traumatic events plays a major role in the construction of group identities and the challenging of unjust political systems. In IS the study of non-governmental organizations and democratization could benefit from these insights.We are interested in those groups and individuals who, going against popular expectations, have decided not to surrender their political voices in return for sympathy and social acceptance. Our study explores the different coping and empowerment strategies that have been exercised by women in democratizing states, including Lithuania and Guatemala. Women are likely to be marginalized during the time of political transition. Which strategies of empowerment are they using to obtain a political voice? How do they cope with traumatic memories? To gain insight into these questions, we established cooperation with women activists in Lithuania and Guatemala. This project has inspired us to include several service learning and project based learning elements into our teaching. For example, we recruited several students to do internships with a women?s center in Lithuania and incorporated several projects involving women's centers into our classes. Our presentation will discuss the challenges of interdisciplinary research and international cooperation as well as the changes in our teaching that have been stimulated by this project. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine how official memory is constituted through the work of truth commissions in relation to ethnic violence. Truth commissions have increasingly become a popular mechanism for states to commemorate violent pasts that do not neatly fit into authorized Histories of the nation and the state. Through the work of a specific commission, the Sri Lankan Presidential Truth Commission on Ethnic Violence, I trace how official memory works to produce the category of ?violence? in such a manner as to contain it. What is remembered and what is forgotten in this process of producing violence? Can we produce coherent analytical or investigative accounts of why violence occurred in a way that does not involve forgetting the trauma and force of violence? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, little attempt has been made to theorise trauma within International Relations. Poststructural theorists have done most to draw attention to trauma as the neglected ‘other’ of violence. They argue that trauma has been concealed and silen ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychology is a vast and ever changing field that has generated a variety of paradigms, specialties and subspecialties that continue to be under-tapped by scholars in international studies. For example, my subspecialty in the psychology of traumatic stress can be used to generate original ideas, models and practical applications for addressing problems in international relations. We can ask questions at the level of understanding the views of individual leaders that affect international relations, e.g., to consider the influence that a childhood experience of a church bombing in Birmingham Alabama may have had on the foreign policy views of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Alternatively, we can ask questions at a larger societal level about the effects of trauma, e.g., the relationships between perceived threat, fear, and foreign policy views in the American public after the September 11 2001 terrorism attacks. We can also turn around the question and create and test models linking structural and other variables at the international level to incidents of torture and other types of political violence and their psychological consequences. Although such investigations appear promising, those that exist are in their infancy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]