Scarred Communities and Collective Healing: Review of Prof. Daya Somasundaram’s Frameworks for Psychosocial Recovery, Community Resilience and Peacebuilding

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.