Legacies of War, Healing, Justice and Social Transformation in Mozambique

Abstract

Mass political violence such as civil wars generates physical destruction, forced population movements, human rights violations and crimes, as well as immense individual and collective suffering on a global scale. In response, sometimes national, regional and international humanitarian organisations have intervened by implementing humanitarian projects with psychosocial approaches in war-ridden communities to mitigate the multiple consequences of war violence. Yet very often, psychosocial approaches have focused on the role of singular interventions with pre-determined timeframes to deal with seemingly complex war violence-related problems such as physical disabilities or psychic trauma. Interventions have focused separately on family support, counselling, self-help groups and the strengthening of individual or community resources. These types of approaches are insufficient to address the complexity of needs and to grasp the dynamics of available resources among war-affected populations. Using the context of the Mozambican civil war (1976–1992), this chapter fills in this gap by analysing how the majority of survivors relied on and transformed the locally available resources to mitigate the impact of the war at the individual, family and community level. By following the everyday lives of the war survivors and post-war generations in their pursuit of locally generated healing and justice resources, this chapter contributes to a better understanding of how war-affected populations experience trauma but also demonstrate multifaceted resilience and social transformation over time. The chapter argues that the fields of war trauma, humanitarian interventions and social recovery in war-affected regions should more seriously develop interventions that are built-upon and expands locally-available and accessible resources in order to effectively address the complex needs of civil war survivors over time.