Giovana Manfrin

Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Giovana is an alumna of the 2015-16 EPIIC '“Future of Europe” colloquium, where I first met her as a classmate. She graduated the following year with a BA in International Relations and a minor in Economics.

Originally from Curitiba, Brazil, she is currently a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she analyzes data-driven policies, interventions, and evidence-based gender research for policy design and delivery with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP). She works closely with the WAPPP Executive Director informing policymakers and stakeholders in different nations on strategies that close gender gaps in political leadership. Giovana also works with a network of international projects inspired on WAPPP’s political training program, the "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office: A Political Campaign Practicum," to help bring more women to the highest levels of political decision-making and statecraft.

The exchange below was conducted in the Fall of 2019. We discuss her unique and remarkable story, her time in EPIIC and at Tufts, her current aspirations and motivations, and the role she envisions for herself in the future.

As her friend, I value Giovana’s determination, candor, and warmth tremendously. It’s an honor to know her, and to be able to present her here.

- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019

EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into upon entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a recent transfer student? What was most meaningful to you about the experience? 

The theme was “The Future of Europe” when I transferred to Tufts in the Fall of 2015. What first drew me into EPIIC was my novice problematization of Europe. Brazilian by nationality, I didn’t know much about studies of Europe. But I knew enough to find issues with that broad categorization – just as Brazil has very little in common with other regions in Latin America (more so internally and across many pockets of Brazilian communities), being insensitive to the minutiae of the European fabric, I thought, would make any student of the world very shortsighted.[1]

Unlike any other class, “The Future of Europe” – and the larger EPIIC colloquium experience – turned out to defy any and all neat assumptions of statehood, unity, conflict, peace, and statecraft. In every session, I felt a level of pressure and chaos that would boil my blood. I never ceased to feel challenged but, strangely, I also felt homeward-bound. Now that I look back, it had indeed been a while since I had last felt the drive that EPIIC re-installed in me.

Perhaps because I was brought up that way, I am someone who gets interested in navigating complex situations, people, and places. I grew up in a somewhat turbulent environment where poverty, angst, and dreams met. As a result, very broadly, I learned to appreciate – and frequently look for – some degree of chaos in life. Complex and convoluted situations and domains – from individuals to ideas and work-place environments – have always taught me how to seek the highest levels of wisdom, to come up with the most creative solutions, and to find the greatest fulfillment in working with others. So, when I quit my decades-old career as a ballerina to continue my undergraduate studies of international relations at Tufts, I was uncomfortably numb.

Gladly I met the IGL, and was accepted into the EPIIC 2015-2016 cohort. The class itself was my own version of Brendan Simms’s Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present – our first assignment, the 720-page book that we read within the first few weeks of the semester. Just like Simms’s book, EPIIC delved deeply into the account of the past half-millennium of European history, but (unlike the book) never forgetting the traditionally-marginalized angles that are often left out of conversations about state formation: multiculturalism (as read in Pallavi Aiyar’s The New Old World); the politics of memory (as we learned from Dan Stone’s Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945); and political disfranchisement (as seen from the many readings on migration referred by Mark Miller, Julia Stewart-David and Kelly Greenhill). Just like the many ideas of Europe, every EPIIIC session that year was illuminating, and revealing. EPIIC brought color again into my every-day.

All in all, I needed the level of difficulty and intensity that EPIIC was about to offer; as soon as I heard the rumors about the class being “too much,” I was sold. I wasn’t wrong – it was indeed very demanding. But it became one of my most enriching life/school experiences. Little did I know that the friendships that I made in EPIIC would also come to stay. Today, they are my dearest and most trusted circle of friends. Liam, Jérôme, Maria, Mile, Paulina, Raasika, Reece (in alphabetical order, or else they’ll lose my number) and everyone else from our year, as well as folks who were also part of the larger EPIIC/IGL ecosystem – Cody Valdes, Heather Barry, Jacob Throwe, Rizwan Ladha, and most uniquely, Sherman – are essential components of one of the strongest pillars of my support system.

To “what was most meaningful to me” about the EPIIC experience community, not only I rediscovered my purpose as a student, but I also found my most loyal friends. Overall, I also regained the best version of myself – one which I thought had gotten lost for good.

You had a very unique background compared to others in that EPIIC class, or at Tufts in general - most of us expected from a much younger age to come to an American liberal arts university for our chosen field of study, and I don’t recall meeting anyone else who was on track to become a professional ballet dancer. How did you come to your interest in global affairs, and what can you say in retrospect about the transition? Did you perceive your relatively circuitous path as an advantage, or as barrier? How do you feel about it now? 

I became interested in “international relations” as a field of study from a professor at Miami Dade College (where I studied before transferring to Tufts), an inspiring woman of incredible character who did an even more incredible job helping us understand the impacts of international security on individual people’s lives. Later on, I studied these links again at a class at The Fletcher School on nuclear politics with Francesca Giovannini. But my ever-growing interest in deeper cultural intelligence has been part of me much earlier than that.

It is hard for me to explain in words, but I remember always thinking about how other parts of the world behaved, so as to see how we could learn from one another, in an effort to become better citizens of the same globe. Likely because of the pervasive inequalities that surrounded me, I was never satisfied with the theories from geography, religion, and history alone. I always tried to look for better answers for why politics and modern economic growth have led some places to be so institutionally dysfunctional. Fast forward to now, I like to think of IR as an ideal opportunity to absorb the contributions from every individual social science. Jérôme and I were talking about this the other evening over jazz records and wine.

Letting go of my ballet career wasn’t easy. I was dancing since I was 2 and had my last performance was when I was 21. Like I mentioned, I lacked a bit of purpose as the years went by after I stopped dancing. But experiences like EPIIC reaffirmed my passion for that deep curiosity and solicitous worldview to addressing the world’s most gruesome problems. I got to act on that childhood tenacity, because the constant turmoil and instability of regions that I was learning about put me on an unending road of learning from people.

On adapting from being a ballerina to an aspiring diplomat – it felt to me nearly the same as when I took my first solo flight to Miami, when I was 16, when I left home. When I watched the plane contour the immense curve from the south of Brazil to the south of Florida, I realized that there were more than two Americas, and a bigger world to be understood; other “theaters” to be studied.

On the roads that stretch behind us, this hasn’t always been possible, but I learned to embrace my background as a ballerina. Today I think that my understanding of people and of the world to be much more unconventional – in terms of being nuanced and apt to integrate factors that traditional IR theories have forgotten about. To me, this essentially means studying gender, racial and cognitive diversity, heterogenous preferences within a state demographic, faith, food, dialects, and all of the intersectional variations of the social, intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic, linguistic, analytical, human gamut that compose international affairs.  

You found unanticipated new passions and sources of inspiration during your senior year at Tufts, not least the course on nuclear security you took at Fletcher. How did your experience in EPIIC draw you to these opportunities, and prepare you for them? How do they continue to influence you? 

What I learned in EPIIC became a valuable tool that I will always take with me – to be always analytical and humble, however the segment within international affairs. I like to think that we will always be students of world politics, independent of the level of field experience acquired. World/international politics are complex by virtue and in “kaleidoscopic” levels; as such, EPIIC showed me that by being humble in garnering and seeking all facets of knowledge, studying politics can be a very efficient approach to potentially solving problems of global scale.

This encouraged me to venture into the politics of nuclear energy, which turned out to be a very meaningful way that I found to understand international security. Nuclear, both as a technological and foreign policy tool, is source of geopolitical instability. I saw it recently happen with Brazil at the turn of administrations, with the rapid expansion of our nuclear-fueled submarine that had been somewhat dormant – to the worries of the IAEA. 

That aside, I will always strive to be most humble and analytical in my pursuits within the IR field. Currently, I work on the intersection of politics and economics, assessing evidence-based policy across countries that focus on the merits of gender equality in political leadership. More simply put, I analyze political, economic, and social landscapes, in an effort to disseminate data-driven solutions to governments about what works to create gender equality in parliaments around the world. 

The collection of these experiences showed me that I am very “data-heavy.” By data I mean everything from the intangible qualities that are very hard to code in a dataset, such as preferences or patterns of behavior, to the coordinates of geospatial data. Although I am fierce about working within the domains of international security within international relations, EPIIC has broaden my horizons by teaching me to be, again, analytical and humble.

How did the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School become your destination after graduation? How have you grown in your roles there, and what you learned from them? 

I think that the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) is one of the very few evidence-based think-tanks within a larger policy environment that is the Harvard Kennedy School. In my senior year at Tufts, I was looking to get more proficient in applying that deep level of analysis into the practical world of politics. My objective after graduating was to learn how to be an effective political analyst regardless of area of focus within world politics. Not having had any prior formal teaching on the role of gender, the focus of WAPPP on global gender equity really challenged me, and gave me the opportunity to enrich the range and depth of my knowledge of international affairs more than I expected.

I started at WAPPP first as an undergraduate intern working part-time during my senior year. I was then hired into working very closely with the Executive Director after graduation in 2017. A year after, I became a fellow managing research projects on gender and politics, traveling internationally at short notice, and always analyzing data-driven tools that help governments effectively capacitate gender diversity, parity, and inclusion into political leadership. It has been the mission of creating intersectional diversity in politics and how important that is for peace and security that motivated my long hours and unexpected travels.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned how to apply a gender lens in international relations from WAPPP. Unfortunately, this has been severely under-appreciated by IR scholars left and right. I very much hope this can change and would expect that, going forward, it becomes its own required module in IR curricula, and that it also further becomes more actively sought by students and teachers, academics and practitioners alike.

What’s next for you? Longterm?

I have always thought of myself as becoming a diplomat within defense and security later on. The job of a diplomat working with disarmament affairs or ethical AI governance, for example, would fall in that category.

Because I think the road into diplomacy is a long one, I would love to gradually grow into that direction. With that, I see myself working next with geopolitics and intelligence. I know that this may sound like a diversion, but to be successful in these roles, I would love to purse an advanced degree in economics. As a researcher working with political data, I have developed great respect and value for evidence-based, data-driven strategies, which is enabled by quantitative research. This is confidential for now, but I am going to apply (and hopefully get accepted into) the Tufts MS in Economics.

In essence, I see myself being able to work very well across the spectrum: (1) mastering data collection and analysis (which my current role at WAPPP has allowed me to do, and which a master’s degree in economics would take me to a higher level); (2) distilling and disseminating information to stakeholders (which the role of a geopolitical or intelligence analysts entails); and (3) enacting a policy decision in the realm of defense and security. The core problem that I see with diplomacy is that diplomats don’t have much of a role in informing political decisions. But right now, I am only 25, and have plenty of time to reflect on, and to learn.

[1] One of the class readings, The Idea of Europe: An Essay by George Steiner, made me settle on a just notion what Europe is. The Idea of Europe is now my favorite prose.

Reece Wallace

I am a Tufts alumnus and proud member of EPIIC’s 2015-2016 colloquium on the Future of Europe. With encouragement from Sherman, IGL staff and my EPIIC classmates, I was supported at every step of my college journey across the social sciences and humanities and from Medford to Oxford and back.

Graduating with a degree in philosophy in 2019, I went on to focus in philosophy at the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. My thesis centered on the moral and political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., weaving together longstanding interests in the interface between philosophy, intellectual history, and “the real world”.

I have since worked as a writer in a range of professional contexts. After a stint as a reporter on the financial industry, I worked as a proposal writer for the Foundation and Institutional Advisory practice at AllianceBernstein, a global asset manager. I currently work on proposal writing and business development for the Foundations and Endowments Specialty Practice at Truist Bank.

I look forward to more professional twists and turns as I explore the challenges and opportunities around me. For now, I’m happy to have landed back in my hometown of Houston, where I enjoy reading, fishing, and mild winters. 

This exchange was had during his time as a Masters student at the University of Chicago. We begin with his time at Tufts and in EPIIC. We touch upon his chief interests in moral and political philosophy, literature, history, and the humanities generally. We also discuss his aspirations to find a vocation in teaching, practicing journalism, or otherwise engaging in the publishing and editorial world. I expect he will find the means to combine his many interests and pursuits, knowing him to be both a deep thinker and an integrator of ideas. I know he will do great things in any and all domains he engages in.

Reece is among the most thoughtful and intellectually principled people I’ve met. It’s a privilege to have known him as a classmate in EPIIC, and now to have him as a friend.

- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019

EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a freshman? How did it shape the rest of your college experience?  

I probably would never have heard of EPIIC if it hadn't been for Caitlin Thompson, who at the time I started at Tufts was an upperclassman instructor in the Experimental College and my orientation leader. She spoke about EPIIC in a way that no one else was talking about their schoolwork. I couldn't quite tell what she was getting at (who can know what they're really getting into before they actually get into EPIIC?) but something about the challenge, the camaraderie, and the clarity of purpose she described cut through the noise of orientation week. I went to Sherman's information session a few days later and somehow decided I would give this thing a shot. It was the first academic and intellectual risk I'd ever really taken, but it felt like the right one to take.

In the short term, EPIIC gave me a taste of social science and its complicated interface with the world. It helped me hone in on themes I found resonant and let me follow up on those interests. In my case, those interests tended in the direction of political theory, which is part of the reason I went on to major in philosophy.

As much as any experience I had in college, EPIIC taught me to seek out difficulty. To seek out difficult ideas and debates, but also to seek out the complex social circumstances they're embedded in. It's easy (for me, anyway) to go through the motions, seeking the path of least resistance and avoiding the intellectual and social-emotional risks of important work. But you just can't do that and succeed in a project like EPIIC. You need to learn to be confident in what you know and honest about everything you don't. You need to trust other people and take seriously the trust they put in you. You need to know how to lead and how to follow. You need a sense of your horizons. I think EPIIC gave me those skills and that sense. 

Overall, The experience was breathtaking--breathtakingly challenging, breathtakingly fun, breathtakingly meaningful. I came away from the year with new standards for myself and my work, and friends who continue to hold me to them.

Is there anything particularly unique and meaningful about the friendships you made?

I'm definitely introverted, and often shy to boot, but I love people. More often than I'd like, I have the experience of wanting deeply to connect with and feel comfortable around people I admire and feeling like I fail at it. There are steps I can take to improve myself and manage that feeling, but to some extent I think it'll follow me wherever I go. For whatever reason, though, the friends I made in EPIIC are that rare type who put me totally at ease. Not intellectually at ease (they can think circles around me), but as their friend and fellow traveler. My friends from EPIIC are some of most thoughtful, kind, and humane folks I know.

You studied philosophy at Tufts, and I know you to be sensitive to the tension between the life of the mind and the call to civic engagement. How have you navigated that tension through your time at Tufts? How did EPIIC influence your approach?

Philosophy felt like the right place to sit with various tensions. For one, it's right there at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, disciplines I love and whose boundaries are very porous. Although they're often hybrids, I think philosophers are very much humanists in this respect: they worry about how and whether they can justify their work in a world that demands action. There are purists who dismiss this worry, but more who take it seriously. The professors and classmates I found in philosophy, as in so many other places at Tufts, grappled honestly with the tension of theory and practice. In particular, I'm grateful to have been a student of Lionel McPherson and Erin Kelly, excellent thinkers who shaped the academic interests I'm pursuing in grad school. Maybe most of all, I admire Susan Russinoff, my advisor. She's a fantastic teacher and an advocate anyone would be lucky to have. They are all people who recognized their stake in the world and took responsibility for it. I think I discovered that ethos in EPIIC, and I've tried to stay close by it ever since. 

Near the end of my time at Tufts I had the chance to join the Ethics Bowl team, one of the nerdier things I did as an undergraduate (and that's saying something). I joined up at the prompting of some good friends and with the encouragement of Professor Russinoff, our coach and sponsor. As a practical ethics contest, it falls naturally at the intersection of philosophy and the world, of thinking and acting. This was a place I wanted to be.

I didn't realize at the time that Ethics Bowl would lead me farther beyond the ivory tower than I had imagined. In my last semester, my teammates and I traveled to MCI Concord, a prison, to work with incarcerated students on ethical reasoning and help facilitate a version of our competition. It was intense, humbling, and amazing to start a conversation with the students at Concord about justice and punishment and the ways we have of thinking through our responsibilities to each other. I can't imagine a higher purpose for philosophy, for academia, or for life than to struggle with these issues.

You have a deep interest in a broad range of eclectic topics, including, for example, international justice, theory of mind, and nuclear security. What core principles and convictions tie together how you think about these themes?

I wish I had a good answer! The honest through-line is probably that I have too much time on my hands. Like a lot of topics I'm interested in, they are all conditions in the lives we live and the society we share. They’re all given, in the sense that they came before us, but not in the sense that they're unchanging. I think if we pay attention, we can notice the circumstances under which they do change, and consider what that means for us. 

I've been thinking especially about how notions of identity condition us to think about ourselves and the problems we face. Racial, ethnic, gender, and national identities are all critical background conditions which, as we're seeing now, sometimes break into the foreground in our personal and political lives. They are incredibly consequential, and yet they change constantly, and faster than we recognize. I'm interested in how and whether philosophical analysis can pinpoint what we mean when we talk about these identities, how we use these identities in practice, and how we ought to think about, talk about, and use them. 

What drew you to the Masters in the Humanities at the University of Chicago? Will you gravitate to a particular discipline, or choose a multidisciplinary focus?

I'll probably focus somewhere between political philosophy and literature. If that doesn't sound like a focus, well, I can't argue with that. Unlike a lot of other, more specialized master's programs, the MAPH allows you to work across and even beyond the traditional humanities disciplines over the course of the degree. I think a tragedy of the disciplines, or at least of grad school, is that you have to sacrifice so much interesting, worthwhile stuff in order to gain "expertise" in something. I really appreciate that I can make my own way here and stave off some of the pressure to specialize for a little while. 

What are the virtues of generalizing? How does resisting specialization allow you to grow in ways you might otherwise not?

Hopefully I'll learn more and more about the virtues of generalizing as I go! As far as growth is concerned, I think being a generalist forces you to first articulate and then address problems and projects, making the case for their importance in terms that aren't domain-specific. Needless to say, we can't do without specialists. But I think specialists sometimes fall into a blinkered worldview that sets the agenda for them. Often that's what we want--it's an efficient way for super-competent people to prioritize and throw themselves at prescribed challenges. On the other hand, there's always going to be an important place for people who, because they don't have the scaffolding of a particular professional community or a narrow skill set, have to set think hard about setting the agenda in light of the connections they see between things.

What’s next for you? What are your aspirations?

I'm using this year to hone my academic and non-academic writing skills, which I'd love to put to use somehow.

From there, whether I go the PhD route or not, I plan to give myself at least a year out in the real world, and I'd like to fill it with something worthwhile.  

By "real world," I mean the world that exists outside the incentive structure of the research university system. I think it's hard to overstate how much that incentive system distorts values, relationships, and self-image (in good and bad ways), and it's always worth reminding myself of that fact as I consider the costs and benefits of a career in or outside academia.

Journalism really interests me, for example. Teaching, too. Ultimately I don't want to be too precious about what comes next. I want to be grateful for now, and for all the opportunities I'm unbelievably lucky to have moving forward.

What draws you to writing and journalism? The joy of the act? An impact you aspire to have?

Both! My own writing certainly hasn't made an impact in the world, but it has definitely impacted me. There will never be anything else like writing as a tool for learning. And when it's done really well, it's one of the best forms for sharing what you've learned. I hope that someday I'll have learned something well enough to help someone else understand it. I would be in a position to do for others what great writers do for me every day.

Whose writing and philosophy do you admire?

These days I'm interested in  Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and especially Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of them formulated compelling responses to unimaginable injustice. In King's case, he's only fairly recently been taken up by scholars as a full-fledged philosopher instead of rather than just a great orator. This is long overdue--his thinking about justice, ethics, and nonviolence are subtle, powerful, and highly relevant today. 

Mike Niconchuk

Michael Niconchuk is a researcher and practitioner at the intersection of mental health and psychosocial support, peacebuilding, violence prevention. 

Beginning his career working in community development among former combatants from the armed opposition in Guatemala, he has worked for more than a decade with refugee communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, and Germany building trauma-focused community mental health programs. From 2012-2015 he served as the Emergency Response Coordinator for Questscope, leading interagency humanitarian coordination and the establishment of referral systems for young refugees in conflict with the law. In 2015 he was awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Award to complete his master's degree in social cognition at University College London, where he researched the neurobiology of dehumanization and trauma. In 2017, he joined Beyond Conflict's neuroscience and social conflict innovation lab, spearheading various research projects exploring the neurobiological aspects of intergroup violence and conflict-related stress and trauma.

Since 2019 he has supported international efforts to repatriate, rehabilitate, and reintegrate children and families of foreign fighters in the Islamic State, strengthening trauma-informed law enforcement and community responses in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, The Maldives, Iraq and Bosnia. Michael currently serves as a Program Manager with the Wend Collective. He is a consultant to UNDP’s mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) programs and also serves on the Advisory Board to the New York-based Counter Extremism Project (CEP). 

Mike is a co-author of The Field Guide for Barefoot Psychology, an innovative trauma psychoeducation and self-care program for Syrian refugees, and is an author of the US Institute of Peace’s RISE Action Guide for the reintegration of extremism-affiliated adults. 

In this interview, Michael “Mike” Niconchuk reflects on some of the intimate lessons he has learned on healing and coping from refugees he has developed friendships with over the last five years working in post-conflict and displaced communities in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. He has a particular focus on young people at risk of violence and conflict with the law. For three years, after the start of the conflict in Syria, Mike worked as an Emergency Response Coordinator in Za’atri Refugee Camp in Jordan, leading various projects for violence reduction, youth leadership, and alternative education. Since then, Mike has worked with refugees across various stages of their migration journey—from Greece, to Germany, to Canada, and the United States—conducting research on the links between forced displacement, stress, social cognition, and social behavior.

He also shares insights he has gained from his empirical social cognition and neuroendocrinology research into the biological impacts of subjective belonging and violent extremism, while studying as a recent US-UK Fulbright scholar at University College London.

Mike continues to pursue innovative research that combines methods from neuroscience, peace building, and conflict reduction. Currently, he works as a consultant for various organizations in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, using a behavioral science lens to design and evaluate programs for violence prevention and psychosocial wellbeing. In 2016, Mike was named an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict, where he continues to develop his research on the psychology and neurobiology of displacement, violence, and marginalization.

I recently accompanied Mike, an alumnus of our Institute, to the Island of Lesvos, Greece, to participate in a Tällberg Foundation workshop on the underlying cause and potential long-term consequences of Europe’s refugee crisis, “Clash of Civilizations?”

EuropeNow In your opinion, what is the global challenge in front of us in terms of migration, trauma, and healing?

Mike Niconchuk Millions of people have fled to Europe in the past three years. By boat and by foot, the means people have used to get to “somewhere better” have pushed to the boundaries of empathetic imagination and moral consciousness, leaving us in a place of fatigue, cognitive dissonance, and political polarization.

Beyond basic needs and economic integration, there is an imperative of healing that accompanies the refugee crisis,

Whether in Canada, Europe, or the Middle East, from my experience, resilience outshines trauma, and that deserves attention. Much of mental health—in our rhetoric, policy, and prescriptions—is approached from a deficit model as opposed to an asset model. We focus on what is wrong with the person after conflict, without reveling in how much remains intact. While it is imperative to continue to innovate in the clinical space, I continue to learn so much about healing and coping from communities still living what many would blanket label as “trauma.”

For me, the challenge has two major components. First, how do we best work with communities to understand their own healing and resilience, as much as we try to understand their suffering? And second, how can we best unravel and conquer the growing politics and fear and polarization that has done so much damage to otherwise beautiful chances for mutual healing and coexistence?

EuropeNow What are you trying to do?

Mike Niconchuk I’m trying to work with people during and after conflict, and restore their minds to pride and joy despite having lived through these horrible circumstances.

Brain sciences offer a fantastic lens for unpacking individual and group-level drivers of conflict. Beyond clinical psychology, which has formed the bedrock of trauma healing and mental health care, neuroscience and social cognitive science provide additional ways of looking at how we think, above and beyond the political or behavioral summations of what we think.

Just as there are certain commonalities in the narratives and impacts of conflict on communities in various geographies, brain science affords a unique luxury of stripping bare something we all share—brains—and cautiously interrogates it to better understand how we create conflict, how we experience conflict, and how we change because of it. These three questions are key to designing better programs for resilience, recovery, and healing. By understanding what conflict, migration, and trauma do to us at cellular, chemical, and cognitive levels, we can work together to strengthen the “better angels of our nature.”[1]

EuropeNow What brought you to this intersection of brain science, migration, and program design?

Mike Niconchuk My mother lived through one of the most notorious wars in the Western Hemisphere, in Guatemala. As a child, being part of a family formed by war never meant much to me. It was not until I started my undergraduate education in International Relations at Tufts that I began to ask bigger, deeper questions about what it means to live through war, leave your home, and start over. At the time, it still barely dawned on me that my own mother lived through a conflict, considering she barely talked about it at home. Now, I’m not surprised she never talked about it.

My family’s story is not rare, and I take pride in a blurred line between academic pursuit and self-awareness. The U.S., a land of immigrants, if an amnesic one, is rich with stories and lessons about migration, trauma, and healing. Wars in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, or the Far East pushed millions of people to pursue futures in the “Land of Opportunity,” either by force or by choice. In 1950 alone, the United States accepted nearly 250,000 immigrants,[2] though of course not all of these were victims of forced displacement. My mother moved to the U.S. because she fell in love, not because she was forced to flee, but that does not diminish her experience of war, or the legacy it left in her, and her family’s, minds. Her story has grounded me with a solid understanding that “refugees,” in the legal sense, are hardly the only ones whose minds, hearts, and trajectories, are profoundly affected by conflict. That is not to diminish our media, philanthropic, or practical focus on refugees, but to remind that war is bigger, and its tendrils exceed our most liberal categorizations of victims.

The questions I had about trauma, memory, and its extended impacts only grew over three years in Jordan, while working in Za’atri Refugee Camp. On the periphery of the world’s most talked-about humanitarian crises, the youth I worked with were spinning quickly in a revolving door of conflict and vulnerability. Some still could never fathom picking up a weapon. Others had fought in the early days of the conflict. Others had been imprisoned, abused, threatened. Others were contemplating return to any number of rebel groups who were doing the “right thing,” in their minds.

I continue to explore the biological and neural correlates of violence, trauma, and recovery, as well as the myriad social cognitive issues such as values, stereotypes, forgiveness, belonging, fear, and stress that spin in that revolving door of conflict, between victimization and perpetration.

EuropeNow Is healing possible?

Mike Niconchuk For Mahmoud, a twenty nine-year-old refugee from Damascus, all he wants is to be able to cope with each day, to find some way to make meaning in a numbing routine of restricted movement, isolation, and risk. For others, healing means shedding the intrusive thoughts that creep in their minds, which poke them like a hot iron and force them to recall images they have tried to forget.[3]

Refugees move, but their experiences, their thoughts, and traumatic memories move with them.  Not all victims of conflicts and not all people who live through violence are traumatized,[4] and the mandate of healing after crises is not confined to those whose symptomology qualifies as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Indeed, the question of healing is bigger than PTSD, and is bigger than the refugee crisis. While this may seem controversial to those outside of the mental health sector, there is an important distinction that we must make between trauma, trauma-induced disorders, and other consequences of exposure to violence[1]. The word trauma or traumatized can be used carelessly by media and by practitioners outside of, and to some extent within, the mental health sector. Particularly when it comes to refugees, the label “traumatized” predictably accompanies too many headlines about those fleeing conflict zones. In American politics today, there is much talk of “healing divisions” while divisions seem to be multiplying each day. One of the founding fathers of trauma healing—Bessel Van Der Kolk—highlights some of the cross-causal commonalities of stress on the individual, suggesting that the “human response to overwhelming and uncontrollable life events is remarkably consistent”[5] across different types of events—childhood abuse, natural disasters, or living in a concentration camp.

Without doubt, war affects the minds and memories of all survivors, but traumatizedimplies a pathology that must be separated from other psychological and social impacts of war, if we are to work meaningfully, and honestly with refugees, internally displaced persons, and other survivors of conflict.[6]

In my own work, I look at the idea of “healing” through an asset-based and biological framework. To phrase it as a question, I ask how do non-medical resources like social belonging, agency, and economic integration affect biological and psychological resilience of those who have lived through war? We know, for example, that social isolation and exclusion affect physical health and wellbeing, and result in acute changes in stress hormone levels. Perhaps the opposite is true, that refugee communities who enter into societies (in neighboring counties, or in Europe, or in Canada) that facilitate a greater sense of belonging and social mobility have demonstrable positive changes in stress hormone responses, fear-reactivity, and pro-social behavior.

My own questions in no way challenge or disagree with advances in clinical treatment of PTSD and other disorders. It is, however, a different lens through which to ask the same question of how we restore normalcy—biologically, socially, and emotionally—after suffering. So, overall, yes, healing is possible, and we have just begun to scratch the surface of understanding how humans heal after conflict, just as we have only begun to scratch the surface in our understanding of the extent to which violence is a deeply embodied experience.

EuropeNow So, what exactly is required of humanity, in Europe and elsewhere, to increase the possibility and space for healing?

Mike Niconchuk There are practical steps that need to be taken in the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) sector—increased funding, training, advocacy—to increase and expand opportunities for healing at a clinical level. The mental health and wellbeing of refugees is critical to their social, economic, and cultural integration, even if integration is still ill-defined. Beyond integration policy, the cultivation of a sense of belonging, place, and meaning is fundamental for mental and social wellbeing, not just for refugees, but for anyone.[7]I would go so far as to say that the mental health and sense of belonging among migrants, and their children who will be European-born, is a security issue.[8]Maybe, if placed in that lens, refugees’ mental health will be given the public health and policy attention it deserves.

Imagine if even 15 percent of refugees arrived in Germany with missing limbs. We would assume that their current state would jeopardize their social and economic productivity, no? Trauma and stress, even social stress below the threshold of “trauma,” have biological and cognitive impacts which negatively affect physical health,[9] executive functioning,[10]can lead to anti-social behavior,[11] and can even lead to higher risk of depressive symptoms in offspring.[12] The crisis of refugee mental health and healing is a generational one that should be met with cutting edge research, bold policy, and realism.

There is progress, on many fronts, though most initiatives remain small scale. In Germany for example, the International Psychological Organization (Ipso), Berlin, is training a cadre of several dozen refugees with psychotherapy training in their home countries, to serve as psychotherapists for new arrivals to Germany. The idea of providing clinical services in refugees’ native language—the language of their memories—is an important first step, but requires tremendous human resource investment and cultural sensitivity.

Over a beer, Nisreen—who has a Master’s degree from the University of Damascus—expressed her fundamental concerns over “integration” stress, and what that means for her:

“At every step, our lives are about doing what others tell us. Our country was destroyed. No one asked me. We had to flee to Lebanon. No one asked me. We had to come here and start over, and no one asked me. They tell me we have to do this and that, and that we can’t do certain things. Why doesn’t the world try to integrate with me? Why is integration always about me becoming less of me, and more of what someone else wants me to be?”

So much of healing is about meeting people where they are. Where “they are” is in unpleasant space where discomfort sets the stage, and compassion and fear battle for control of our minds and our actions. To heal, within our own communities or to heal others, requires some acceptance of an uncomfortable new world order, where the options for opinion and policy seem increasingly binary, torn between myopic, but natural, tribalism on one hand, and strategic, if anxious, embrace, on the other. In working to heal others who have experienced unfathomable loss, we will spend much of the time looking in mirrors, where our personal pasts and historical legacies loom ominously. If we confront those mirrors successfully, we can truly make healing as powerful a force as loss.

Mike Niconchuk has spent more than five years working in post-conflict and displaced communities in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, with a particular focus on young people at risk of violence and conflict with the law. For three years, after the start of the conflict in Syria, Mike worked as an Emergency Response Coordinator in Za’atri Refugee Camp in Jordan, leading various projects for violence reduction, youth leadership, and alternative education. Since then, Mike has worked with refugees across various stages of their migration journey—from Greece, to Germany, to Canada, and the United States—conducting research on the links between forced displacement, stress, social cognition, and social behavior. As a Fulbright scholar at University College London, Mike began empirical research into the biological impacts of subjective belonging, and continues to pursue innovative research that combine methods from neuroscience, neurobiology, peacebuilding, and conflict reduction. Currently, Mike works as a consultant for various organizations in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, using a behavioral science lens to design and evaluate programs for violence prevention and psychosocial wellbeing. In 2016, Mike was named an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict, where he continues to develop his research on the psychology and neurobiology of displacement, violence, and marginalization.

References

[1] Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined (Vol. 75). New York: Viking.

[2] Haines, David. (2015) Learning from Our Past: The Refugee Experience in the United States. Special Report, United States Immigration Council. Available at: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/refugee-experience-united-states

[3] Ehlers, A., Hackmann, A., Steil, R., Clohessy, S., Wenninger, K., & Winter, H. (2002). The nature of intrusive memories after trauma: The warning signal hypothesis. Behaviour research and therapy, 40(9), 995-1002.

[4] Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449-1462.

[5] Van der Kolk, B. A. (2003). Psychological trauma. American Psychiatric Pub.

[7] Kawachi, I., & Berkman, L. F. (2001). Social ties and mental health. Journal of Urban health, 78(3), 458-467.
[6] van Ommeren, M., Saxena, S. and Saraceno, B. 2005. Mental and social health during and after acute emergencies: emerging consensus?. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 83(1), pp. 71-75.

[8] Calamur, Krishnadev (15 June 2016) “Are Immigrants Prone to Crime and Terrorism?” The Atlantic. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/immigrants-and-crime/486884/

[9] Schnurr, P. P., & Green, B. L. (2004). Trauma and health: Physical health consequences of exposure to extreme stress. American Psychological Association.

[10] Hayes, J. P., VanElzakker, M. B., & Shin, L. M. (2012). Emotion and cognition interactions in PTSD: a review of neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 6, 89.

[11] Breslau, N., Davis, G. C., Andreski, P., & Peterson, E. (1991). Traumatic events and posttraumatic stress disorder in an urban population of young adults. Archives of general psychiatry, 48(3), 216-222.

[12] Yehuda, R., Bierer, L. M., Schmeidler, J., Aferiat, D. H., Breslau, I., & Dolan, S. (2014). Low cortisol and risk for PTSD in adult offspring of holocaust survivors. American Journal of Psychiatry.