Chapter 8 | Reconstructing The Self
The end of extremely violent conflicts such as the Rwandan genocide or the Apartheid in South Africa has led us to question the psychological reparation of victims but also of executioners.
Indeed, the idea of treating the trauma caused by armed conflicts has emerged as a means for states to create the conditions for “living” together, hoping for a lasting end to violence.
The research work of Richard Rechtman, Lotte Buch Segal, Emilie Medeiros and Valérie Robin-Azevedo analyses this political recognition of individual wounds as a collective work to end violence but also as “the site of a test of possible reparation on a collective scale”.
Through the analysis of two restoration devices, that of the self (psychological care for the consequences of violence) and of the social space between the dead and the living (restoration of funeral rites or the return of bodies for examples), the study questions the normativities they can create and shows how this individual reconstruction constitutes a resource for political action.
The study of the Palestinian case and that of the Nepalese civil war allow us to understand the mechanism of these devices.