Al Fuertes

Community-based Warviews, Resiliency and Healing: the Internally Displaced Persons in Mindanao and the Karen Refugees on the Thai-burmese Border Al Fuertes

This book explores the phenomenological realities of violence and trauma, resiliency and healing among the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in central Mindanao and the Karen refugees on the Thai-Burmese border. They came as a result of constant fighting between government military and minority armed opposition groups, causing massive displacement of the civil population. The book highlights that warviews, defined as people's conceptualizations and articulations of their experience of war and displacement, inform resiliency and that resiliency, which constitutes people's capacity to survive, addresses people's warviews towards healing. Healing connotes physiological and psycho-emotional, relational, economic, and political implications. My study concludes that no matter how victimized they feel about themselves, the IDPs in Mindanao and the Karen refugees, with further assistance from the international community and their respective governments, are capable of naming and responding to their individual and collective sense of reality and they actively participate in their own healing and community building.