Our team at King’s College London (KCL) looks at how conflict traumas affect mental health and pathways to violent/peaceful decision-making over time. In essence, we seek to understand why some individuals resort to violence while others choose peace in different conflict zones across the world.
These themes are explored through a number of research strands, exploring competing narratives in memorialization and heritage restoration; experiences of imprisonment; the motivations of armed actors; a lack of trust in institutions; the role of values and identities in shaping violent and peaceful propensities; memory; mental health; cross-generational trauma; and the impact of trauma and post-traumatic growth.
Our approach provides a robust empirical foundation for developing tangible, practical recommendations for governments and other stakeholders. Our goal is to translate rigorous academic research into accessible insights that drive meaningful change. We achieve this by proposing psychosocial interventions aimed at reducing violence and fostering peace.
Led by a multidisciplinary team within the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) and with colleagues across various departments at King’s College London, our researchers use a diverse range of quantitative and qualitative tools such as longitudinal psychometric surveys, nested experimental interventions, semi-structured interviews, and oral histories.
As part of this research, we are fielding an extensive psychometric survey, the Impact of Trauma Survey (IoTS), in Iraq, Lebanon, and South Sudan. The surveys explore the role that trauma and mental health – related to conflict exposure, adverse childhood experiences, and other factors – can play in shaping people’s attitudes to violent or peaceful behaviour.
To date, our research has generated key insights for policymakers and practitioners such as: the importance of implementing scalable mental health interventions to break cycles of violence; increasing the visibility of male trauma and its implications in policy and research; balancing heritage restoration with acknowledgement of informal sites and spaces; involving national and local actors in heritage promotion; gathering feedback to ensure that Western peacebuilding language does not alienate or discourage local populations; and navigating sacred values in high level conflict negotiations.
Key sub-themes for this research cluster include:
- Memorialisation and peacebuilding
- Prison and (de-)radicalisation
- Impact of Trauma Survey (IoTS)
- Cross-generational trauma and memory
- Post-traumatic growth
- Trust in institutions and attitudes to violence and reconciliation
Watch the below video to learn more about this cluster of XCEPT research.