Description
"Re-Imagining Peace After Massacres" seeks to develop a model for how best to intervene to help re-establish functioning societies and to prevent failed states in areas that have experienced horrific acts of widespread killings and related atrocities such as mutilation, rapes, destruction of villages, and mass deportations. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanaties Institute on Violence and Survival and the Center for International Studies and Research function as coordinating institutions working together with four international and local interdisciplinary teams based in Guatemala, the Kivus/Ituri (DRC), Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Cambodia (with support teams based in the U.S., France, Switzerland, Italy, and Australia). The project focuses on three critical areas for the reintegration and rehabilitation of post-mass crime societies: First, on the family and community, where gender and intergenerational roles as well as values and codes of conduct need to be re-defined; second, on the public and private rituals and the narratives that sustain collective and individual memories of the history, causes, and course of mass crimes; and third, on the ways in which people identify themselves vis-a-vis society and state, because building peace in post-mass crime societies requires people to redefine both their understanding of "us" and of "them" in relation to the environment.
