Dr Mareike Schomerus: The mental and behavioural landscape of post-conflict recovery

Speaker: Dr Mareike Schomerus

Chair: Dr Christine Cheng

How countries recover from conflict is often measured using simple indicators: Is security improving? Are services being delivered? Is the economy growing? Often the answer to all these questions can be yes and yet, for the people who have lived through the conflict, the feeling of being in post-conflict recovery never sets in. Why is that? One factor that is overlooked is how people experience their own recovery and the choices and behaviours that result from this experience.  Northern Ugandans, for example, have diverse opinions on whether their lives have been rebuilt since the end of violent conflict. The war’s legacy shapes everyday experience of structural and institutional issues as well as social and personal, or even psychological, concerns. Together, the presence of the war in people’s minds and the structural problems are the ‘mental landscape of post-conflict recovery.’ But how does this mental landscape influence individual behaviour and how can a mental landscape be shifted towards experiencing and benefitting from recovery?

Dr Mareike Schomerus is the Head of Programme Politics and Governance, and the Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at odi in London. She is a widely published researcher with a body of work on the resolution of violent conflict and peace processes in South Sudan and Uganda. Prior to her career in research, Mareike was a broadcast journalist. Her most recent publications are Blind Sides and Soft Spots: An Evaluation of Norway’s Aid Engagement in South Sudan (co-authored), Secessionism in African Politics: Aspiration, Grievance, Performance, Disenchantment with Pierre Englebert and Lotje de Vries and the forthcoming The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa.