Community-Based Warviews, Resiliency and Healing Among the Internally Displaced Persons in Mindanao and the Karen Refugees on the Thai-Burmese Border

This dissertation explores the phenomenological realities of violence and trauma, resiliency and healing in two cases: the Karen refugees who are situated on the Thai-Burmese border and the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Bukidnon and Cotabato provinces in central Mindanao, Philippines. Both of these displaced communities came as a result of constant fighting between government military and minority armed opposition groups, causing massive displacement of the civil population.

The results of this study indicate 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 for the participants in this study connotes physiological and psycho-emotional, relational, economic, and political implications. This 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, the NGOs and the governments of the Philippines (for the IDPs) and Burma as well as Thailand (for Karen refugees), 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.