Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War

Оглавление

Sharon Alane Abramowitz. Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War

Отрывок из книги

Searching for Normal

in the Wake of the Liberian War

.....

It is important to note that the cycle of violence thesis, though widely circulated in therapeutic circles in the United States and elsewhere to this day, was researched intensively in the 1980’s, and was debunked. A series of case-control studies that examined violence among the adult survivors of child abuse found that participants were as likely to choose non-violence in their intimate relationships as they were likely to enter into abusive relationships. The appeal of the cycle of violence metaphor, however, has remained strong, and has persisted across therapeutic domains, and has entered into the international sphere of peacekeeping interventions. There, in ways reminiscent of the theories that emerged from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud and Strachey 1958), and classical anthropological studies of culture and personality (Benedict 1989), the idea of the deterministic nature of the cycle of violence has come to form a constitutive part of peacekeeping discourse.

Psychological theories regarding the cycle of violence were mapped onto Liberia’s postconflict space in fascinating ways. Drawing on the cycle-of-violence hypothesis, politicians, humanitarians, psychologists, and historians have argued that violence is inscribed into the cultural, ethnic, and tribal folkways of the Liberian population. Humanitarian workers and peacekeeping officials invoked cycle-of-violence arguments routinely; and merged their claims with arguments about resource scarcity and warlord politics had led to the social conditions contributing to civil war in Liberia (See Ellis 1999, Powers 2005, Reno 1999). But remarkably, these explanatory models extended to the U.S. and Liberian political classes, as well.

.....