Extracted from Natasha Chilambo’s Article, “Reimagining Health to Counter Violent Extremism”
The Boko Haram conflict in north-east Nigeria has created a situation of acute and enduring humanitarian need over the past decade. Boko Haram has attacked both government forces and civilians, carried out suicide attacks, and mass kidnappings.
An estimated 41 thousand people have died, with more than three million people displaced by this conflict.
A narrow definition and operationalization of peace and security limits the breadth of the responses to conflict. State-sanctioned solutions have typically been militarized yet yielded limited success.
We have seen that simply eradicating the leader of this insurgency does not uproot an ideology that forms the basis for harm at this large a scale. An armed response is insufficient. Therefore, all stakeholders need to expand and reconfigure what constitutes a comprehensive response to the problems presented by Boko Haram.
An appreciation of the relationship between trauma and violent extremism offers a vital key to a fuller approach to preventing and countering violent extremism.
Trauma, and ill mental health is rarely a consideration of insecurity. By centring trauma in managing violent extremism, we are made to consider the vulnerabilities of communities in greater detail and with greater care.
This lens offers more clues about how violent extremism manifests and is maintained because it requires the blurring of disciplinary confines and authentic interdisciplinary work. For example, a peacebuilding intervention would need to consider the psychological wellbeing of communities they seek to engage with—trauma may be a barrier to reconciliation.
Using the trauma-violent extremism lens forces us to simultaneously expand our notions of health, as well as peace and security. Looking through this lens challenges the convenient myths of psychiatric universalism and perceiving violent extremism as a phenomenon requiring a predominantly militarized response. Health as a bridge to peace is a useful framework that illustrates the richness of having expansive notions of health and peace and security.
In the Neem Foundation’s Counselling on Wheels programme, interventions are designed and delivered predominantly by academics and practitioners from the North East. Alongside these interventions, there is ongoing interdisciplinary research work capturing vast amounts of data.
A 2020 evaluation found that the Counselling on Wheels programme engaged close to two thousand people from a range of stakeholder groups, and over ten thousand people from more than forty local communities through psychotherapy interventions. The evidence demonstrated that the Counselling on Wheels programmes significantly reduced people’s mental distress as well as vulnerability to violent extremism.
This model offers an entry point towards a decolonial approach to global mental health and peace and security. The researchers and practitioners within Neem reflect the diverse socio-political and economic backgrounds of the communities they serve, thus reducing the epistemic and experiential gap. Neem challenges existing power imbalances in knowledge production and the practices that emerge from it by decentring hegemonic Western definitions of mental distress and insecurity. Instead, the organization reconfigures the definitions of health and insecurity by expanding them to include the structural factors at play. Health, therefore, ceases to merely be a biological phenomenon, and peace and security an issue that is dealt with simply by adopting militaristic approaches. This is exciting, but there is still some way to go in the aspiration of using health as a bridge to peace.
While Counselling on Wheels boasts delivering psychosocial support and counselling services to over 31 thousand beneficiaries in Borno State, why isn’t the government relying on it? Perhaps this is to do with legitimacy. This programme sits between the tension of forming new ways whilst having to exists within paradigms that dictate a particular discourse and praxis. Counselling on Wheels must prove its legitimacy to the very systems it seeks to disrupt. Inherently, this requires compromise. For example, to capture the trauma of the affected communities, the counsellors may rely on psychological metric tools that were designed in the West. Whist this will yield data that demonstrates the scope of the problem, and the ways in which Counselling on Wheels has alleviated it, it risks reinforcing the very dominant framings of mental health it challenges. This has implications on the impact on policy and funding.
Similarly, what are peace metrics beyond a lack of armed conflict – how will we know that Boko Haram is defeated? Different ways of understanding and sustaining peace will be needed to move beyond militarized peace and security.
Organizations must develop an imagination and a maturity that helps them to discern which tools to use to dismantle the master’s house.
Bay States News 