Trauma and the politics of exclusion: Social work and post-war Rwanda.

This dissertation raises questions about the effects of international non-governmental organization (INGO) interventions in Rwanda during the eight years following the official end of its civil war (1994--2002). More specifically, it examines ideas and practices involving what became known as psychosocial trauma as they were created and carried out by a variety of actors, including expatriate INGO personnel; the Rwandan government; middle class Rwandan trauma counselors and other professionals; and poor and working class Rwandans. It begins with a discussion of the historical and epistemological underpinnings of this study and continues with an analysis of interviews and participant observation conducted in two trauma counseling programs and in a mudugudu, or housing project, located in southwest Rwanda. After concluding that almost none of the residents of the mudugudu had ever consulted a trauma counselor and few saw trauma as a serious problem, the dissertation asks what other kinds of effects trauma counseling programs may have had in Rwanda. Some of the effects discussed include: (1) the categorization of social problems as either psychosocial or material and the assignment of responsibility for these problems to the individual; (2) the disciplining of expressions of anger and protest and the coercion of participation in the programs designed by the Rwandan elite and its international funders; (3) the perpetuation of assumptions that women are both more vulnerable to trauma and more responsible for bringing about peace and reconciliation; and (4) the legitimation of social programs created by fundamentalist Christian organizations. The conclusion argues that well-meaning social workers who are called upon to fix massive social problems with severely limited resources need to stop to consider the possible effects their efforts may help generate long after they have moved on to the next crisis. It calls upon social workers based in the global North, whether they see themselves as internationally or domestically focused, as well as development workers to formulate new understandings of how their theories and practices interact with a political context in which a deepening division is emerging between a global elite and a large group of people who have become structurally irrelevant.PhDCultural anthropologySocial SciencesSocial workUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125202/2/3186740.pd