Boris Cyrulnik is a neuropsychiatrist who is known in France for having developed and popularized the concept of resilience. Born to a Jewish family in Bordeaux in 1937, he lost both his parents during the Second World War and, at the age of 6, escaped deportation himself by hiding during a round-up of Jews organized by the Nazis. His recollections of that event, forty years after the end of the war, provided the foundations for a reflection on post-war traumatic memory. In this interview for the Review, he talks about the relationship between memory, trauma and resilience, both at an individual and a collective level.

Even during armed conflict and other situations of violence, all children are entitled to their rights and protections as children without distinction based on their age, gender, religion, or whether they are associated with an armed group. Despite this, millions of children in conflict zones face discrimination, ostracization and stigmatization. This is particularly true for children affiliated with groups designated as “terrorist”, who face a range of challenges in reintegrating into society.

Civil society can play an important role at the international, regional and domestic levels in helping children formerly associated with armed groups, or otherwise affected by armed conflict, to rejoin communities. Mira Kusumarini is a professional in the peace and security field in Indonesia who works to address the problems of women and children who have been associated with armed groups, and to help them reintegrate them into society. She is the Executive Director of the Coalition of Civil Society Against Violent Extremism (C-SAVE), a collaborative network of civil society organizations.

In this interview, she discusses the challenges involved in the reintegration of children who have been associated with extremist groups in Indonesia and the stigma they face, as well as the importance of empathy in helping communities to heal.

Protracted conflicts are a major source of human suffering and can cause long-term displacement and development reversals. Although protracted conflicts can take many forms, they are generally characterized by their longevity, intractability and mutability. Authorities involved in situations of protracted conflict face complex challenges, particularly when it comes to ensuring that international humanitarian law (IHL) is respected by their armed forces.

The government of the Philippines has been involved in multiple non-international armed conflicts against insurgent groups for more than fifty years. In this interview, Lieutenant-Colonel Joven Capitulo, who works to implement the policies, activities and programmes of the Philippine Department of National Defense and Philippine Department of Defense initiatives on national legislation pertaining to compliance with IHL, shares the perspective of a State dealing with several protracted situations of non-international armed conflict. He tells the Review about some of the IHL considerations involved when a military is engaged in counter-insurgency on its own territory over a period of decades.

Situations of protracted armed conflict, whether one armed conflict or a succession of several armed conflicts over a long period of time, subject the affected population to both short-term and long-term effects of warfare. Below are two timelines tracing the experiences of two women during situations of protracted conflict in two countries: Sheringul in Afghanistan, and Om Nawwar in Iraq. Their experiences show that life continues in such contexts, despite violence and instability.

Drawing on a corpus of accounts written by survivor children in 2006, this article looks at the Tutsi genocide through the eyes of children, enabling us to see the radical social and emotional transgressions of 1994 from a new angle. As members of society and prime targets of the genocide, these children tell how the world of their childhood was turned upside-down, through the unique intensity of their own words. An idealized “before”, inhabited by the beloved characters of their parents, brothers and sisters, is brutally swept away as everything they have known becomes inverted. Forced to watch killings and cruelty, they adopt survival strategies that show how thoroughly they understand the radical nature of what is unfolding. An extreme distrust of adults will forever mark these children – now orphans – who still live in “the time of the genocide”.

In this issue, the Review has chosen to give a voice to former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Children recruited by armed groups experience separation from their families, physical and psychological violence, sometimes including sexual exploitation, as well as interruption of their education. Whether they joined an armed group forcibly or by choice, as a fighter or carrying out a different function – every story is unique, reflecting numerous challenges faced by children in these circumstances. The testimonies below reflect children's experiences, the difficulties they have faced and their hopes for a new life. In order to protect them and their relatives, their testimonies have been anonymized.

Protectionist frames of children as passive, uncomprehending victims characterize the international architecture of responding to children in war. However, stories such as those in children's war memoirs draw attention to the agency and capacity of children to negotiate and navigate distinct traumas and experiences in war. Children experience particular vulnerabilities and risks in conflict zones and their potential as contributors to the solutions to war must also be taken seriously. Children's authoritative voices in memoir writing reveal the limitations of protectionist-dominated approaches and offer a rationale for taking the participatory elements of international humanitarian mechanisms and responses to conflict more seriously. Such a move may help address the comprehensive silencing of children's voices in the institutional architecture concerned with children in war.

Is remembrance an absolute moral duty or is it better thought of in more ethically constricted pragmatic and empirical terms? This essay argues that both individuals and societies should strive for remembrance where possible, but accept that there are times and places where more forgetting is the only safe choice to make. One may hope that at some point in the future the need to remember will sweep away a prudential decision to forget, but while we are within our moral rights to hope that, in a given case, forgetting itself will outlive its usefulness, conflating our wishes with teleological certainties is an exercise in hubris, not morality. But on no account should memory be thought of as a categorical imperative.

For almost two decades now, Geneva Call has been engaged in developing humanitarian dialogue with some 150 armed non-State actors (ANSAs), with the aim of increasing their knowledge and respect of humanitarian norms. Developing a protection dialogue with ANSAs is not an easy task, and it becomes more complex when groups split, mutate or join larger movements. Humanitarian organizations need to adapt their analysis to a more frequent timescale, keeping in touch constantly with a wide range of key stakeholders in order not to lose track of the current groups’ status and structure. In this note, Geneva Call's Director of Operations discusses some of the organization's experiences and lessons learned.

Children in armed conflict are frequently deprived of basic needs, psychologically supportive environments, educational and vocational opportunities, and other resources that promote positive psychosocial development and mental health. This article describes the mental health challenges faced by conflict-affected children and youth, the interventions designed to prevent or ameliorate the psychosocial impact of conflict-related experiences, and a case example of the challenges and opportunities related to addressing the mental health needs of Rohingya children and youth.

Traumatic memories of war can result in mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is characterized by intrusive trauma memories and severe stress responses with devastating personal and societal consequences. Current treatments teach patients to regulate trauma memories, but many experience a return of symptoms even after initially successful treatment. Neuroscience is discovering ways to permanently modify trauma memories and prevent the return of symptoms. Such memory modification techniques (MMTs) have great clinical potential but also important ethical, legal and social implications. In this article, the authors describe PTSD, the role of memory in PTSD, its effects on the brain, and the limitations of current treatment methods. Then, the state of the art of the neuroscience of MMTs is presented. Within this realistic scientific framework the authors will discuss the ethical, legal and social implications of MMTs for the treatment of war-induced PTSD, especially in a military population. Three major sets of issues will be focused on: safety and social justice concerns, concerns about threats to authenticity and identity, and the possible legal and moral duties to retain certain memories. Finally, the article concludes that within scientific reality, concerns are limited and do not outweigh the potential benefits of developing treatments for patients.

The rehabilitation of essential services infrastructure following hostilities, whether during a conflict or post-conflict, is a complex undertaking. This is made more complicated in protracted conflicts due to the continuing cycle of damage and expedient repair amid changing demands. The rehabilitation paradigm that was developed for the successful post-World War II rehabilitation of Germany and Japan has been less successful since. There are a myriad of conflicting interests that impede its application, yet the issue consistently comes down to a lack of systems-level understanding of the current situation on the ground and a lack of alignment between what is delivered and the actual local need. This article proposes a novel conceptual framework to address this, affording a greater “system of systems” understanding of the local essential services and how they can be restored to reflect the changed needs of the local population that has itself been changed by the conflict. The recommendations draw on heuristic practice and commercially available tools to provide a practicable approach to restoring infrastructure function in order to enable essential services that are resilient to temporary returns to violence and support the overall rehabilitation of the affected community.

Insurgent groups are registering births in territories which they control, and yet States do not recognize insurgent birth registration, resulting in a legal vacuum with harsh consequences for children. Based on international human rights and humanitarian law provisions related to birth registration, this article argues that insurgent groups have an inherent power to register births in order to fulfil their obligations under international humanitarian law, and that State obligation to ensure the right to recognition as a person under the law should require States to recognize insurgent birth registration in order to prevent harm to children.

The displacement of civilians during a protracted war is a difficult issue that deserves our attention, and Iraq is unfortunately an emblematic example of this phenomenon. Based on the literature produced by humanitarian organizations and academia, this article aims at analyzing what triggers displacement in protracted conflict, highlighting the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) violations. It discusses how Iraq has been struggling with acts of violence, hostilities and IHL violations that have generated displacement and human suffering.

While the dominant human rights discourse on transitional justice constitutes a mix of reinforcing aims that seek to “make peace with” a violent past, this article complicates this notion by exploring how affective memories can prevent individuals from envisioning a future for themselves in which their individual and their nation's past is safely left behind. In the context of ongoing debates over whether to remember or forget a country's traumatic past, the article will show how affective memories of violence and disappearance prevail and disrupt the reconciliation paradigm, and need to be taken into account in transitional justice processes.

Transitional justice is a conspicuous feature of responses to mass atrocities. Rooted in accountability and redress for victims, transitional justice mechanisms influence and are influenced by collective memory of conflicts. This article looks at the dynamics between memory, trauma and forgiveness in Cambodia. Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodians expressed limited knowledge of the past, a strong desire for the truth, and lingering feelings of hatred. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) created or renewed demand for truth, along with some desire for harm to come to the wrongdoers. Although the ECCC was set up several decades after the mass atrocities, the data suggest that the ECCC and the civil society movement associated with it may have had positive outcomes on addressing the legacy of the violence.

Over the past five years, various developments in the international aid policy sphere have resurfaced a decades-old discussion about the link between humanitarian action, development and peace efforts – the so-called “triple nexus”. This discussion focuses on protracted conflicts and fragile settings, as these are environments where humanitarian funding and response are overstretched and where development and peace struggle to take hold.

Three important reference points in this policy environment are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),1 the Agenda for Humanity2 and the twin United Nations (UN) resolutions on sustaining peace.3 These various commitments have been driving development actors to seek ways to engage earlier and remain present in conflict-affected areas.4 They have mobilized many donors and organizations around a vision in which humanitarian action works to reduce needs, risks and vulnerability, in addition to responding to needs,5 and they have spurred the UN system into organizational reforms to ensure a system-wide coherent effort towards the SDGs, including in places affected by conflict.6 They have also been accompanied by renewed calls for, and efforts towards, greater transparency, efficiency, accountability, collaboration and results across the international aid system.

Efforts to achieve the right synergy between humanitarian action, development and peace efforts have again regained momentum globally. But they have also raised concerns within the humanitarian community about a shrinking space for neutral, impartial and independent humanitarian action during armed conflict.

In this Q&A, Policy Adviser Filipa Schmitz Guinote discusses the International Committee of the Red Cross's (ICRC) policy reflections on the interface between humanitarian action, development and peace, and the so-called “triple nexus” discussion. She unpacks some of the conceptual and practical tensions around humanitarian principles and humanitarian identity in the interaction between humanitarian, development and peace actors. She also outlines the rationale behind the ICRC's work with affected people in protracted conflicts, against the backdrop of an ICRC Institutional Strategy which commits the organization to building sustainable humanitarian impact with affected people and working with others.