This panel invites reflection on the ‘lateral’ dimension of transmission of trauma and resilience in the context of repeated outbreaks of violent conflict and genocide in the African Great Lakes region.
Repeated outbreaks of conflict and genocide in this region have sparked scholarly interest in the psycho-traumatic dimensions of conflict, with a rising number of scientific publications on the theme emerging over the last decade. These studies, and literature about trauma transmission more generally, have predominantly focused on the inter- and transgenerational dimensions (which may be characterized here as ‘vertical’), the unintentional, and the transmission of trauma rather than also resilience or repair. For instance, seminal works such as those by Abraham and Torok (1978) employ the concept of the ‘phantom’ to describe how ‘crypts’—particularly violent forms of trauma—are unconsciously passed down to subsequent generations.
The roots of this field finding itself in the post-Holocaust period in a variety of ‘western’ contexts, undoubtedly strongly influenced the current contours of concepts and frameworks at hand. These find their way to African contexts despite the uneasy relation it has to realities lived in these other parts of the world, where thinking about trauma warrants more reflection temporality (particularly duration and repetition) and intentionality. For instance, Vermylen (2023) proposed the term ‘phantom war’ as an alternative to ‘cyclical war’ to analyze the traumatic dimension at the heart of recurring violence in Eastern Congo and the sub-region, while Ntahombaye (1983) and Simbananiye (2005) demonstrate how political and traumatic messages are intentionally communicated to neighbors and children through naming practices. These themes also find their way in the recent project by Berckmoes and colleagues in Rwanda, in which domestic pedagogies of peace and conflict are explored to understand mechanisms of repetition and repair (2024; 2025).
There have been important efforts to include more theoretical attention to the temporality of trauma transmission relevant for African contexts. An important thinker in this regard is South African psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Looking at the legacies of Apartheid, she frames intergenerational trauma transmission within a ‘triadic’ perspective, where memory crosses and re-crosses past, present, and future temporalities, thereby rethinking the trajectories of trauma (2023). Another strand of literature, inspired by Gillian Eagle and Debra Kaminer’s concept of ‘continuous traumatic stress,’ (2013), challenges the assumption that trauma is necessarily a past event. With their concept they foreground continuity, thus highlighting the current and ongoing dangers inherent in protracted situations of violence.
In this panel, we aim to shed more light on two aspects of psychosocial legacies of conflict that have so far received very limited attention, both in African contexts and beyond. First, we bring together papers that explore the ‘lateral’ dimensions of trauma transmission. With this we refer to the process occurring within horizontal social structures: among siblings, within neighborhoods, through peer-to-peer political control systems, or between different social groups belonging to the same generation. Second, we go beyond the focus on trauma only by explicitly exploring transmission of resilience too, thus questioning pathways out of victimhood and towards repair.
highlighting these themes from psychosocial and -anthropological perspectives.
All papers address legacies and continuities of conflict in different parts of the African Great Lakes region, particularly interlacustrine zone of Burundi, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo. This region is notorious for large-scale and repeated outbreaks of mass violence. Moreover, this regional focus will allow us to, in the discussion, to connect our findings on psycho-traumatic dimensions to debates on ‘lateral’ transmission that have received more attention in scholarly literature, albeit so far conceived mainly from political and demographic perspectives; that is, the ‘spread’ of conflict through population displacement.
Please submit abstracts to Aurore Vermylen (aurore.vermylen@uclouvain.be) and Lidewyde Berckmoes (l.h.berckmoes@asc.leidenuniv.nl) by September 6.
