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The following article appeared in the December 1999 issue (Volume 30, Number 11) of the APA Monitor, the monthly newsletter of the American Psychological Association. UPenn offers 10-week training
program on ethnopolitical war By L. Rabasca, Monitor Staff How would you complete this assignment? Design a psychosocial intervention for 18,000 refugees from an African
country where civil war has raged for a dozen years. The refugees are mainly
women and children. Most are from rural areas, but they've been moved to a
camp outside the country's largest city. That challenge was part of a 10-week program offered for the first time
last summer at the University of Pennsylvania through the Solomon Asch Center
for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. The program seeks to prepare
psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists to work
on issues of ethnopolitical conflict, ranging from basic research to
conducting and evaluating interventions for victims of ethnic violence. The intervention assignment was posed to 19 students by Maryanne Loughry,
a refugee studies professor at the University of Oxford. But most of the
students in the class answered by focusing on the importance of identifying
local leaders and other professionals within a community ravaged by war,
rather than reuniting families or redeveloping community structures--two
psychological interventions that experts say should be the top priorities in
refugee camps. "These are not the kind of one-on-one interventions most psychology
students are familiar with," says Loughry. The program, however, has set out to change that by teaching students
about the roots of ethnic political conflicts and the interventions that work
best. Students studied case histories of ethnopolitical conflict in South Africa,
Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Israel and Palestine, exploring theories of
nationalism and ethnic conflict, aggression and conflict, and group
identification and perceptions, as well as ways to identify and treat
post-traumatic and other stress disorders in victims of conflict. The program was developed in response to a joint initiative by former APA
President Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, and former Canadian Psychological
Association president Peter Suedfeld, PhD, to involve more psychologists and
social scientists in the field. As part of the training, four students will put what they've learned into
practice by working in war-torn communities for one or two years. They are:
Champika Soysa, Alan Keenan, PhD, Alan McCool, PhD, and Sal Libretto, PhD. Their experiences will help shape the curriculum for the next summer institute at the Asch Center, offered in 2001. |
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