Abstract:
Armed conflict often leads to consequences that extend far beyond physical destruction and
deeply affect psychological wellbeing, social cohesion, cultural identity and collective functioning.
Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war profoundly produced widespread psychosocial suffering,
particularly within the Northern and Eastern provinces, where communities experienced repeated
displacement, violence, losses and social fragmentation. This paper critically revisits the scholarship
and field work of Daya Somasundaram and examines its relevance within the contemporary
ICD-11 framework for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD).
The study aims to explore how trauma in collectivistic societies extends beyond individual psychiatric
symptoms and becomes embedded within families, communities, cultural practices and
collective memory. A narrative review methodology was employed using peer-reviewed journal articles,
interdisciplinary studies and field reports collected from Scopus, PubMed, Google Scholar
and ScienceDirect. The review synthesized literature related to collective trauma, psychosocial
recovery, community resilience, ICD-11 trauma classifications and post-conflict peacebuilding
in Sri Lanka. The findings reveal that ICD-11 diagnostic categories are valuable for identifying
individual-level suffering but remain insufficient to fully explain the collective trauma experienced
in war-affected Tamil communities. The review highlights how prolonged conflict disrupted family
systems, weakened social capital, eroded communal trust and damaged collective identity.
At the same time, resilience emerged through cultural rituals, communal mourning practices,
women-led initiatives and community-based support networks. Cyclone Ditwah is also discussed
as a contrasting case of an acute natural disaster compared to the prolonged collective trauma of
the civil war. The paper concludes that sustainable recovery and peacebuilding need culturally
grounded and community-centred psychosocial interventions that address healing at individual,
family, community and societal levels simultaneously.
