Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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lost due to this wickedness? No!”
The Sociality of Trauma
As Agnes’s words demonstrate, the search for the new normal roamed beyond the tents and examination rooms in which trauma counseling took place. The purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between individual and collective trauma and the project of postwar social repair during a moment in which the Liberian state and its citizenry were in a state of traumatic transition, and to explore the architecture of the new normal through the lens of the massive global humanitarian project of trauma healing and psychosocial intervention in Liberia’s early postwar reconstruction, from 2003 to 2008. The story of postwar trauma has a life of its own that runs across humanitarian programs, through the the subjectivities of all those who provided or received psychosocial care or lived just beyond program eligibility, and in mental health and psychosocial programs, policy, implementation guidelines, and budgets. The context for this narrative is Liberia—a small West African country that struggled to rebuild under international peacekeeping forces, while receiving the support of a vast apparatus of humanitarian assistance that sustained the Liberian population until the Liberian state could re-assert its sovereignty.
Following other analyses of mental illness, politics, and violence that probe the “deep structure” of trauma and recovery in massive societal transitions (Pinto, Hyde, and DelVecchio Good 2008), I focus on the “superstructure” of trauma, especially the psychiatrically oriented pacification that has been present but made invisible in the history of military interventions in Africa and elsewhere (see Fanon and Philcox 2008; Elkins 2005, Pupavac 2004). In Africa, and particularly in Liberia, the interactions between international peacekeeping and psychiatry, mental health, and the psychosocial are not, and have never been, neutral, benign, therapeutic, or apolitical. Mental health and psychosocial interventions were directed towards the creation of a new postwar social order that would subordinate past habits of violence to a future of postwar political and social tolerance. The most curious feature of these efforts, however, was that they were uncoordinated, decentralized, ad hoc, and ambivalent. As such, they were indicative of some of the distinctive structural features of twenty-first-century humanitarian aid.
Unlike other works on war and trauma, this book focuses on the sociality of trauma in Liberia, or the ways in which trauma was managed, displayed, communicated, and imagined at every level of society during the postwar period. A vast literature in anthropology, history, and the humanities explores the history of trauma as a social, medical, and legal fact (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Young1995; Shephard 2000) and plumbs the densely interwoven theoretical substrates of how trauma functions in the interiority of the unconscious mind and produces effects in the subjective self (Leys 2000; Caruth 1995; Scarry 1985). But the sociality of trauma is also a crucial axis for analysis. The sociality of trauma can be thought of as the performance of trauma, as the habitus of trauma (Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu and Accardo 1999), as manifestations of trauma, as symptoms of trauma, or as the externalization of trauma. But however one chooses to think about the sociality of trauma, the ontological presence of trauma in postconflict life often exceeded the limits of the explanatory frameworks, etiologies, and genealogies that we use to try to understand and contain it. In Liberia, trauma was a critical modality of the social experience of rupture and of repair, and we need to explore it thoroughly to understand how societies undertake the search for post-violence normalcy. (The psychiatric research literature on trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the neuroscience of trauma continues to grow exponentially, and lies beyond the scope of this work.)
In the first five years of Liberia’s postconflict reconstruction, humanitarian agencies often used the language of trauma, healing, and recovery to describe the challenges confronted by the Liberian nation, but “mental health” was not the focus of humanitarian attention. Managing the trauma of the Liberian population was seen as a tactical necessity to prevent a backsliding into war, and consequently, trauma healing was regarded as a precondition for sustaining the new social order that the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) was trying to solidify. To a population that had been shaken by the death of one-tenth of its citizenry, years of massive population displacement, and the inability to end a destructive thirteen-year long civil war, psychosocial interventions were introduced as a way to exercise a global mandate to restore social order, break the cycle of violence, and introduce pro-social, anti-violent behaviors and ethics.
International NGOs like Save the Children, Médecins du Monde (MDM), the Center for Victims of Torture, and the Lutheran World Federation/World Service (LWF/WS) were charged with implementing trauma healing and psychosocial interventions, and through them, instilling postconflict peace subjectivities (Charbonneau and Parent 2011), the individual and collective dispositions of nonviolent participation in postconflict life. In places like Bosnia (Locke 2009) and Sri Lanka (Argenti-Pillen 2002), and in the context of asylum courts and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (Fassin and Rechtman 2009) anthropologists have explored how the international community has come to regard trauma as a problem of humanitarian management, and how those discourses have been localized. Through Liberians like Agnes, NGOs trained, counseled, and educated the Liberian population one-by-one and en masse, and attempted to mediate personal disputes and community conflicts as cheaply and as quickly as possible. Psychosocial techniques like group trauma counseling, play and sport therapies, and human rights trainings were designed to bring Liberian selves and subjectivities in line with new postconflict ideals of political, social, and economic participation. Although the stated objectives of these programs were psychological healing, peacebuilding, and community reintegration, in practice, the strategy was to socialize Liberians into pro-social, pro-peace, pro-liberal postconflict forms of sociality in order to achieve the primary ends of peace, military and economic stabilization, and national sovereignty. Rather than healing social, psychological, cultural, and political pathologies, mental health, trauma-healing, and psychosocial interventions were, at their foundation, efforts to manage and mitigate the social, psychological, and behavioral sequelae of the Liberian war rather than cure the war’s social, psychological, cultural, and political pathologies. The implicit cure for wartime trauma was to be found in the construction of a new environment of postwar normalcy.
How does trauma work as a social fact, a pervasive cultural force that is both constitutive of social life and functions as a substantial limiter of social possibilities? Like Agnes, many Liberians slipped seamlessly between a psychological understanding of trauma as a consequence of enduring exposure to violence, poverty, displacement, and corruption, a behavioral understanding of trauma as a social pathology, and a moral understanding of trauma as a sign of the moral and dispositional disorder that pervaded the national spirit. Her situated lament as a psychosocial worker employed by an NGO that promoted trauma healing, psychosocial rehabilitation, and mental health treatment identified trauma as an object of critique. But her experiences as a woman, a sister, an aunt, and a citizen gave rise to a keening that focuses our attention on the immediacy of her pain, the cleavage between her past life and her future potential, and the uncertainty of her own postconflict reconstruction. It also focuses our attention on the hope, doubt, and ambivalence about the new normal that were articulated in and out of therapeutic modalities across the recovering postwar world.
Scale Effects
In addition to exploring the relationship between individual and collective trauma and Liberia’s search for the new normal, this book has two important objectives. First, it posits that the issue of scale is important for assessing humanitarian aid’s significance and impact; and second, it examines the promises made and results delivered in the domains of mental health, psychosocial rehabilitation, and trauma healing in postwar Liberia. Scale effects are important for showing how humanitarian organizations used trauma healing and psychosocial interventions not just for healing but also as a strategy for managing chaotic and restless postconflict populations.
In the absence of data documenting the scale of psychosocial, trauma healing, and mental health programs introduced in Liberia and for Liberians, one can only conceptualize the problem of scale ethnographically, by studying the points of engagement between humanitarian programs and beneficiaries and engaging in quantitative conjecture about their number and size. In humanitarian crises across the world, how densely congregated are trauma-healing projects, and how far do their effects