Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda witnessed some of the greatest human disasters since the end of the Second World War. In the aftermath of these horrors, peace and peacebuilding moved into the focus of international attention. Many voices point towards macro structural factors to establish a stable peace and claim that economic and political success will fix the fractures within societies. Others state that economic growth is not sufficient for national reconciliation but that there need to be efforts to overcome the trauma of the war on an individual level. Such a process to establish not only political peace but peace among victims and perpetrators would need to take the psychosocial damages caused by conflicts into consideration. Otherwise, grievances and prejudices would reign within societies and increase the risk for future conflicts. The following two summarized articles highlight the importance of the psychosocial approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda. Two relatively small countries where psychosocial methods are particularly important, since victims and perpetrators live next door.

The acknowledgement that peace enters a society not only on macro levels but needs to bridge as well micro societal problems is pointed out in Hart and Colo’s article on “Psychosocial peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina: approaches to relational and social change”. Therein the authors present cases of attempted psychosocial reconciliation. Those peacebuilding projects aimed to take the whole of person and whole of community approach in order to trigger a transformational change. The relationships of the people during the conflict changed from one of mutual friendship to one of uncertainty and fear of the “other”. Since allegiances became more fixed towards one’s own ethic and religious groups, change can not only come from imposed institutional reforms but from a bottom up reconciliation. The objective of the projects was therefore to reestablish the relationship between groups by bringing them together and letting them tell their story to each other. This psychological storytelling allows to move from pain, anger and fear to an awareness of their deepest mutual interests and needs. Such a psychosocial peacebuilding process provides an insight into the integration of tangible and intangible elements found in post war and ongoing conflict situations and helps to come up with theories of change.

This important element is also described in the article “psychosocial interventions, peacebuilding and development in Rwanda” by Lambourne and Gitau.  The authors criticize a solely state centered approach and bring forward a peacebuilding alternative, which focuses more on individual levels like psychosocial services. This individual and community based capacity building strategy aims to promote resilience and social cohesion. The objective is to bring a society together again on an interpersonal level, something which institutional reformism is ignoring. Social, political and economic change in Rwanda has not been sufficiently grounded in deep psychological transformation required for sustainable peace. The Rwandan case illustrates the importance of a holistic micro-level approach to provide social services that address psychological and emotional needs in addition to the needs for food and security. Thus, drawing from the Rwandan case we need to introduce psychosocial interventions as integral parts of peace building models and apply them to other post-conflict contexts as well.

We can therefore conclude that the divide between ethnic communities are reminders of the impact of war and the enduring effects of post war traumata. Storytelling and psychological assisted exchange can bring about empathy and sympathy among the different groups. The relationships between perpetrator and victims become clearer and an understanding is spread that not the whole group is responsible for certain acts of war but individuals. Lessons from Rwanda and from Bosnia and Herzegovina can be applied in other contexts where ethnic divisions have led to large scale violence. Psychosocial interventions can provide direction for potential joint social action. However, such an approach needs not only people with knowledge and skills of the field, but also individuals and social groups committed to partnerships of change with those, that have been directly involved in the conflict.