Please send your 300-to-500-word abstract/proposal before May 31, 2010.

Despite the impressive literature on post-conflict peacebuilding, most scholars of peacebuilding have given little attention to the goals, effects, and practices of psychology upon the prospects for peace. The violence of conflict has profound emotional and psychological effects of trauma that are intertwined with practical consequences of social disruption (Gasana 2009; Steward 2009), but such links are often forgotten, taken for granted, or assumed to be solved through processes and mechanisms of peacebuilding reconciliation. This research project aspires to bridge the gap between the politics of peacebuilding and what we call the psychologies of peace, thus seeking to open new avenues of research and interdisciplinary cooperation. More specifically, this project aims at examining the intimate but underestimated relationship between processes of psychological healing and political reconciliation.

After the physical and psychological trauma, and the material deprivation, that characterize most (if not all) post-conflict societies – notably in cases of genocide or cyclical violence – the period of individual healing and recovery cannot be separated from political and social reconciliation (Hamber 2009). Given the attention that many peacebuilding scholars are now paying to addressing the ‘root causes’ of conflicts rather than treating their effects, the political and socioeconomic institutions that peacebuilders promote and construct have done little to favour healing or recovery of individuals and social groups (Lira 2009; Hutchisson and Bleiker 2008; Lipshultz 1998). As scholars of psychosocial healing argue, the prospects for social and political reconciliation are undermined when structural stability and order are prioritized over the widespread trauma that affects most individuals and social groups (Danieli 2008; Bar-Tal and Bennink 2004). Primarily, this project seeks to explore both the relationship between psychological individual and group healing/recovery and socio-political reconciliation, and the politics of that relationship as it is written, forgotten, or addressed.

The fundamental assumption driving this project is that while psychological symptoms are borne individually, they are created socially and shared reciprocally. Accordingly, we believe that 1) the relationship between psychological healing/recovery and peacebuilding practices of reconciliation, 2) the psychological and political effects of deepening divides between peacebuilders and their ‘clients’ (victims of war, survivors, war criminals, and other concepts that produce and reproduce the distinction between peacebuilders, victims, and aggressors), and 3) the political possibilities and impossibilities of ‘psychologies of peace’, all require critical, innovative, and reconstructive analyses and approaches.

We call for papers that, if selected, will be included in our edited volume tentatively entitled Peacebuilding and Psychologies of Peace. We welcome proposals from all fields and topics related to our objectives, both theoretical and empirical papers, but we encourage contributions that discuss the following:

• The relationship between psychological healing/recovery and social and political reconciliation
• The meaning(s), significance, psychology and/or politics of the concepts of healing, recovery, reconciliation, peace
• The global politics of psychologies of peace, liberation, regeneration, reconciliation
• The gender politics of psychologies of peace, liberation, regeneration, reconciliation
• The psychology and politics of forgetting, instrumentalization, or denial of trauma
• The goals and/or practices of psychology in peacebuilding practices, or vice versa

Please send your 300-to-500-word abstract/proposal before May 31, 2010 with a short biography to bcharbonneau@laurentian.ca and to gparent@laurentian.ca Responses to proposals will be sent by June 15.

Professors Bruno Charbonneau and Geneviève Parent
Department of Political Science
Laurentian University
Ontario, Canada
Office: 1-800-461-4030, ext. 4327 or 4319
http://www.laurentian.ca/Laurentian/Home/Departments/Political+Science/welcome.htm?Laurentian_Lang=en-CA