How do we lick our wounds? Intercultural perspectives on individual and collective strategies of making peace with own past

Some of the applied strategies were congruent with the culture, and were constructed by the wounded society, while others were not, being imposed by the international community. Some strategies were applied bottom-up, while others were generated top-down. Some models were focussed only on punishing top-range perpetrators and decision makers in conflicts, while others included broader segments of the society, and did not include punishments. Summarizing, we witness a broad range of reparative paradigms; from denial of the painful past to a compulsive repetitive disclosure in order to prevent repetition of the past. However, we can ask ourselves – which societies are better off? What are the universal and what are the culture-specific elements in reparation concepts throughout the world?

Research and clinical experience in the field of intercultural trauma treatment have defined the necessary specific and non-specific ingredients that contribute to a successful healing of individual victims. But is it possible to analyze strategies of “collective healing” through a prism of knowledge that we have on healing of individuals? With other words, can we improve the principles of “collective healing” and reparation in societies across cultures, by applying the paradigms, which are efficient in healing of individual victims? Can some of the principles and processes that have been used with success in the healing of individuals be extrapolated, and used on the collective level? The lecturer will comment on these issues, and raise the necessary questions for future research.