Conceptualizing community development in war-affected populations: illustrations from Tigray

Comment:

This article builds on progress over the last thirty years that has seen development assistance increasingly seeking to address the social and psychological aspects of community recovery, in part through integrating and valuing local knowledge. However, the aims and approaches of subsequent interventions in this space are contested. This article presents a conceptual framework for psychosocial interventions in complex emergencies, to bring together different approaches, based around three dimensions; human capacity, social ecology and culture and values. Humanitarian crises can lead to loss in all three of these domains. However, this framework also identifies potential resources for recovery too, including those rooted in religion and local faith communities. For example, this article illustrates how historical social connections were utilised to rebuild community networks through religious associations and how mythico-history and personal identification with saints and angels were used as key sources of sense-making and resilience in post-conflict communities on the Tigray-Eritrea border.