Life after violence in North India: Islamic relief orgaizations and transactional relationships in a plural humanitarian space

Religious humanitarianism is often closely scrutinized, as it is either viewed as exerting a positive influence in post-conflict contexts—through peace-building and sense-making—or a negative one—through proselytism and division. This article contends that both these (negative and positive) perspectives on the role played by religious organizations overemphasize, to a certain extent, their transformative power in post-conflict contexts, at least in the short term. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with both Islamic and non-confessional humanitarian organizations supporting internally displaced people—victims of anti-Muslim violence in Muzaffarnagar, India—I suggest that the inherent plurality and competitive dimension of the humanitarian field leads to a form of transactional relationship between displaced people and organizations and tends to reduce the importance of ideological differences between organizations. Paying attention to this particularity of the humanitarian field and how displaced people deal with it can provide us with a better understanding of the actual influence of religious humanitarianism in post-conflict contexts.

Beyond Agency as Good: Complicity and Displacement after the Siege of Sarajevo

Forced migration scholars have increasingly documented the agency of displaced persons. However, this scholarship has attended primarily to the positive or constructive dimensions of agency, documenting migrants’ capacities for resilience, resistance, and problem-solving. In this paper, I argue that forced migration scholarship should extend to recognize the darker dimensions of agency, such as complicity in acts of violence. Drawing on emerging work on ‘complex victimhood’ in conflict studies scholarship, which grapples with the difficult simultaneity of victimhood and complicity, I begin to articulate a figure of the ‘complex migrant’. As a case study, I draw on fieldwork with Bosnian Serb women who were part of the 1996 displacement of Serbs from Sarajevo, when the divided city was re-unified following nearly four years of siege by Bosnian Serb forces. Against the figure of the ideal refugee/victim, I outline the numerous deviations that made Serbs illegible as refugees. I also demonstrate how my interlocutors asserted the qualities of the ideal victim in their narratives to make their losses legible. I argue that a complex victimhood framework is useful for analysing other understudied retributive displacements. I also suggest that it can work to gradually disempower discourses that blame migrants when they fail to live up to the ideal of the good victim.

Problem-solving skills groups for female Syrian refugees in Lebanon: a study of a mental health intervention

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Lebanon has witnessed an influx of over one million refugees. This has placed a serious strain on Lebanon’s mental healthcare system, creating the need for an efficient intervention for refugees. Health workers were recruited from various centres and trained to deliver a module of 12 sessions in problem-solving skills in group format. Then, they recruited female Syrian refugees and Lebanese women to form groups and deliver the intervention in the host communities. Results showed that levels of anxiety and depression, as reported by the Hopkins Symptom Checklist screening tool, seemed to decrease significantly after the intervention. An additional outcome was that most of the participants felt supported by other women. These results demonstrated that a direct and short intervention with female refugees can lead to measurable improvements in their mental1 health and was perceived by participants as highly beneficial.