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Beyond victims or villains: Young survivors of political violence
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 32 (2011) 86–88
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Book review Beyond victims or villains: Young survivors of political violence Colette Daiute, Human development and political violence. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-521-73438-7 (paper), 304 pp., $26.99 From 1945 to 1980, the former Yugoslavia functioned as a relatively peaceful country, albeit one formed from six ethnically and religiously diverse republics. With the death of President-for-life Josep Broz Tito, however, ethnic tensions began to mount, especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1991, moves for independence by various republics led to geopolitical fragmentation, violent conflicts, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, seizures of property, and forced migrations. Between 1991 and 1999, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, wounded, and psychologically battered. Approximately 3 million were displaced from their original homes, some emigrating several times in the face of new conflicts. Besides the damage to people, the wars of the 1990s shattered the built environment, the political–economic infrastructure, and civil society itself. After a number of years (and NATO intervention) the wars ended and sovereign states were formed. Constitutions were created, and some displaced people returned to their prewar homes. During these years, children continued to be born, grow, and interact with radically changing societies. As these children, some of whom are the focus of Colette Daiute's book, have moved into adolescence and young adulthood, they are facing unique challenges in trying to build a future in new countries formed out of political violence. Their development into adulthood is shaped by a stillunstable context in which both older and younger generations deal with continued political struggles, tribunals to investigate war crimes, poverty, instability of legal institutions, unemployment, and a lack of health and social services. The effects of this kind of situation on children can be investigated in many ways. Daiute describes the two most commonly observed foci in research studies on children and political violence. One is research on war-related damage to children, such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety. The other involves social reproduction, or cycles of violence, where children are at risk of becoming “villains,” in the sense of repeating the violence they have seen and experienced. Daiute's objection to both of these approaches is not that these effects do not occur, but that both approaches reduce the analysis of political violence to that which happens within the individual. In her view, political violence occurs over a broad range of actors, spaces, and time, and therefore calls for an approach that shifts the perspective away from damage and social reproduction. Her approach is to take young people “seriously” to learn about the legacies of war that matter in their lives. Her questions include: How do youth growing up in environments experiencing political violence and transition interact with the circumstances where they find themselves? On what do they focus? What sense do they make of events? Toward what goals do young people direct their energies? doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2010.12.001
New theory The questions above could be asked about adolescents in many parts of the world where there is violent conflict, but what is most significant about the former Yugoslavia is that a generation born in one country is now growing up in several separate countries and experiencing very different environmental, political, economic, and social circumstances from those present when their parents were young. Adolescents are making the transition to adulthood in nations making the political transitions from war to peace and from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracies. To truly understand this unique situation, Daiute argues, we need new theory and new methods to create analyses that integrate individual and societal development. Cultural–historical activity theory, which forms the theoretical basis for the study, provides the needed shift from problems within the individual to broad causes and effects among institutions and political elites. From this perspective, authoritarian discourses, that is, views promoted by the state and cultural mores as applied to everyday realities, are an important influence on youth development. As these discourses change with political shifts, different ideas become persuasive to different generations. Daiute offers the example of an authoritarian discourse of wartime that persuades a 40-year-old man to deliver a death threat to a neighbor of a different religion who is reluctant to leave town. Such a man is likely to perceive with animosity the expelled neighbor's family returning to claim their house after the war. In contrast, the man's teenage children, persuaded by a postwar authoritarian discourse of social inclusion promoted at school and in the community center, may be curious and friendly toward the returning neighbors. New methods Daiute's “new methods” build on the idea that multiple, sometimes conflicting discourses interact in differing persuasive ways during the course of youth development. Her study explored these interacting discourses by asking young people to participate in research workshops that took place in three countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia) and a refugee community in the United States. The participants (ages 12 to 27) engaged in the Dynamic Story-Telling by Youth workshop, a six-hour series of group activities developed and piloted by Daiute in earlier work. The workshops were designed to engage participants as “social historians and critics,” sharing their experiences through narratives, evaluations of society, letters to public officials, debates, and collaborative inquiries. Children growing up in war-torn countries experience all the horrors such situations entail—loss of family and friends, homelessness, destruction of public buildings and other facilities, fear, discrimination
Book review
and violence. Violence, as Daiute notes, is a system, and like all systems, it creates realities that affect children and youth in different ways than those same realities affect adults. But Daiute's focus is not on her participants' problems, but on their perspectives, ideas, and plans for making a better world in the future. She argues that a sociohistorical analysis of young people's engagement in conflict and its aftermath “provides new insights about the effects of political violence and human development more generally.” In Daiute's view, human development is normative, even in war-affected environments, providing that at least some relationships are close, friendly, or stable, allowing children to take advantage of resources for exploring and mastering their environments. The Dynamic StoryTelling by Youth workshop serves as such a resource, and the products of the workshop help us to understand how young people in these different places, affected in unique ways by years of political conflict and violence, see themselves and their communities. As Daiute puts it, “we ask young people what is on their minds, rather than assume that they are damaged, dangerous, or holding onto collective memories of the past.” Daiute is not arguing that political violence is optimal, or even acceptable as a developmental context. She emphasizes the need to study young people in this context in ways that do not assume vulnerability or risk, not because vulnerability and risk are nonexistent, but because they do not tell the whole story of the effects of political violence on youth. Undoubtedly, children and youth are traumatized by the experiences of war. But trauma is not all that happens to them. In this book, Daiute focuses not on the ways young people cope with individual trauma, but on the ways they move forward as citizens, involving themselves in community activities and working to bring about positive changes for the future.
The workshops The format of the Dynamic Story-Telling by Youth workshop is an interesting one. Drawing on the cultural-historical perspectives of Vygotsky, Luria, and Bakhtin, Daiute acts on the assumption that the psychological life of an individual is inextricably entwined with public life in public space. Therefore, the workshops were designed around socially significant activities to “elicit participants’ engagement with social structures, obstacles, and opportunities.” In Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, they were put on with the cooperation of NonGovernmental Organizations (NGO's), which helped with recruiting participants and provided the community centers where the workshops took place. In the U.S, participants were from Bosnian Muslim immigrant families who had been settled in upstate New York by the U.S. State Department; the workshop took place in a Bosnian bakery. Activities in the workshops were focused around three genres: inquiry, narrative, and advisory. In the inquiry activities, participants responded to a researcherdeveloped survey about how they viewed society, reviewed and discussed results of the same survey previously taken by peers in one of Daiute's earlier studies, and created their own surveys about important issues in the lives of young people in the former Yugoslavia. Daiute's research team compiled the surveys created by all the groups of participants into one survey that was then posted on Surveymonkey.com and sent to all participants. In the narrative activities, participants wrote narratives about true experiences of peer and adult conflicts, and also produced fictional “community narratives” in which they completed a story starter that described the building of a new town center, the groundbreaking of which was interrupted by sudden news that “changed everything.” Participants were asked to finish the story, describing what the sudden news was and how the story turned out. Participants also discussed “public stories” based on actual events in the news in their respective countries. For the advisory activities, participants wrote letters to
87
public officials about issues that concerned them, and evaluated the workshop itself. Analyses of workshop products The book's unique organization takes some getting used to. Daiute does not, for example, devote one chapter, or even part of one chapter, to a complete analysis of each activity in the workshop. Instead, she divides her results and analyses of different activities (and even parts of activities) up among different chapters with different themes. For example, chapter 3, entitled “Living History,” describes participants' responses to some of the questions on the researcher-developed survey, as well as their narratives about adult conflicts. Responses to other questions on the researcher-developed survey are discussed in chapter 5, “Participation Matters,” along with participants’ designing of their own surveys, and their composing of letters to public officials. Narratives about peer conflict, the fictional community narratives, and adult conflict are all discussed in chapter 4, “Critical Narrating.” Shifts in discussion between one activity and another are sometimes hard to follow. Beyond the organizational issues, however, Daiute's analyses offer insightful ways to examine all the different activities her participants engaged in. The written narratives were analyzed on the basis of plots, settings, psychological state expressions (affective, cognitive/ sociocognitive, intention/anticipation), and psychosocial dynamics, such as identifying contradictions, expressing uncertainty over ongoing challenges, and suggesting injustice. The discussion of the surveys created by participants illustrates not only the many different topics generated by the groups, but the pragmatics, that is, the speech act (choose, explain, remember, project to future) implied in each question. Numerous other descriptive categories were used to characterize the output from the different workshop activities. But the most prominent analysis of the contents generated in the workshops was social script analysis. Daiute defines “social script” as a useful concept for examining how young people interpret the significant dynamics in their environments. Analyzing narratives for their social script involves indentifying the combined “plot-purpose organizing of a narrative: conflicts, resolutions, and causal connections” among plot elements. Daiute's analysis of all the participants' narratives revealed, in her view, three major scripts: 1) Tensions abound (in public life), 2) Moving beyond difficulties, and 3) Reflecting on social divisions. These scripts appeared to reflect context-specific developmental dilemmas in the sense that the narratives of participants in different countries reflected higher percentages of content that related to different scripts. Participants from Bosnia & Herzegovina most reflected the “tensions abound” script; in Daiute's view, this is consistent with the country's high death rates during the war, continued displacements, political instability, ethnic divisions, and poor economic situation. Narratives from Serbian participants strongly represented the “reflecting on social divisions” script, consistent with their awareness of tensions between “old vs. new” ideologies, the declaration of independent statehood by Montenegro and anticipation of a break for independence by Kosovo, as well as international pressure on Serbia to turn over war criminals. Participants from Croatia seemed most reflective of the “moving beyond difficulties” script, consistent with their country's status as a candidate nation for the European Union, something youth saw as involving both political-economic opportunities and personal losses related to a shift to a market economy. Though evidence of all three scripts was observed in the youth from the U.S. Bosnian immigrant group, their narratives and comments also reflected an Isolation script, based on recognition that they were better off financially and in terms of security in the U.S., but also faced discrimination based on their immigrant status and religion (they were mostly Muslims). Reflections on the scripts are found throughout the book, as participants identify not only their concerns, but also their ideas for exploring those concerns (creating a survey) and
88
Book review
their proposed solutions (letters to officials). Daiute describes her workshops as involving “interactive, purposeful activity with cultural tools for figuring out what is going on in the world, how one fits, and how one can change circumstances for the better.” Possibly due to this approach, which indeed takes the young people seriously, she finds her participants describing their circumstances as frustrating rather than debilitating, and responding to those circumstances with agency rather than despondency. In other words, they are down, but definitely not out.
Conclusion This is qualitative research, so there is no claim made that the results are representative or generalizable in the traditional, quantitative sense. Both the results and the analyses reflect the views of the participants, including Daiute as participant observer. There is no evidence, for example, that Daiute's categorizations of issues raised in the narratives are corroborated by anyone else, (i.e., there is no evidence of inter-rater reliability) and her own views and theoretical perspective color the analyses she makes. At times, it is difficult to separate her views from those of the young writers; at others, however, their voices are clear and vibrant. Daiute's interpretations reflect her extensive knowledge of the geopolitical issues of the region and the ways in which young people's narratives illustrate their insights and concerns. The book as a whole illustrates not only how qualitative research is done, but why—these young people occupy a unique place in history, and they must be heard for themselves, regardless of the generalizability of their experiences to other places and times. Traditional quantitative methods would not give us the depth of understanding that Daiute's “new methods” allow. What is most fascinating about this book, however, is the workshop approach itself, which allowed the participants to shape the information gathered (by writing their own surveys), analyze the views of other participants, and “speak truth to power” by conveying
their own views to government officials. The experience appears to have been an energizing one for the participants; one said, “I feel powerful thinking about others' responses to a survey I completed a little while ago.” This workshop format, with its emphasis on what young people have to offer rather than what they have to recover from, could be a positive approach among many groups, such as survivors of disasters or human trafficking. It would also be interesting to know more about the long-term impact of this experience on the young people who participated. All of the non-U.S. participants in this study were recruited through NGOs in their countries; these organizations were responsible for creating the community centers where the workshops took place, and many of the participants were already volunteering with a variety of community projects sponsored by the centers. So it can be argued that these young people were likely among the most resilient of the young survivors of the Yugoslavia wars. Possibly they were not the ones most seriously traumatized, nor are they likely to be among those who act out the violence they have experienced by turning to crime or other violent activity. But they nevertheless experienced, and survived, the same events as everyone else, and we need their perspectives for a complete picture of the effects of political violence on development. As a participant observer, Daiute's views and interpretations of the young people's responses are clearly a part of the picture she paints. It is an interesting and hopeful picture, and one that shows youth surviving wartime not as victims, but as citizens of a new day. Bridget A. Franks 1215 Norman Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, United States E-mail address: [email protected]fl.edu. 7 December 2010
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Book review Beyond victims or villains: Young survivors of political violence Colette Daiute, Human development and political violence. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-521-73438-7 (paper), 304 pp., $26.99 From 1945 to 1980, the former Yugoslavia functioned as a relatively peaceful country, albeit one formed from six ethnically and religiously diverse republics. With the death of President-for-life Josep Broz Tito, however, ethnic tensions began to mount, especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1991, moves for independence by various republics led to geopolitical fragmentation, violent conflicts, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, seizures of property, and forced migrations. Between 1991 and 1999, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, wounded, and psychologically battered. Approximately 3 million were displaced from their original homes, some emigrating several times in the face of new conflicts. Besides the damage to people, the wars of the 1990s shattered the built environment, the political–economic infrastructure, and civil society itself. After a number of years (and NATO intervention) the wars ended and sovereign states were formed. Constitutions were created, and some displaced people returned to their prewar homes. During these years, children continued to be born, grow, and interact with radically changing societies. As these children, some of whom are the focus of Colette Daiute's book, have moved into adolescence and young adulthood, they are facing unique challenges in trying to build a future in new countries formed out of political violence. Their development into adulthood is shaped by a stillunstable context in which both older and younger generations deal with continued political struggles, tribunals to investigate war crimes, poverty, instability of legal institutions, unemployment, and a lack of health and social services. The effects of this kind of situation on children can be investigated in many ways. Daiute describes the two most commonly observed foci in research studies on children and political violence. One is research on war-related damage to children, such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety. The other involves social reproduction, or cycles of violence, where children are at risk of becoming “villains,” in the sense of repeating the violence they have seen and experienced. Daiute's objection to both of these approaches is not that these effects do not occur, but that both approaches reduce the analysis of political violence to that which happens within the individual. In her view, political violence occurs over a broad range of actors, spaces, and time, and therefore calls for an approach that shifts the perspective away from damage and social reproduction. Her approach is to take young people “seriously” to learn about the legacies of war that matter in their lives. Her questions include: How do youth growing up in environments experiencing political violence and transition interact with the circumstances where they find themselves? On what do they focus? What sense do they make of events? Toward what goals do young people direct their energies? doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2010.12.001
New theory The questions above could be asked about adolescents in many parts of the world where there is violent conflict, but what is most significant about the former Yugoslavia is that a generation born in one country is now growing up in several separate countries and experiencing very different environmental, political, economic, and social circumstances from those present when their parents were young. Adolescents are making the transition to adulthood in nations making the political transitions from war to peace and from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracies. To truly understand this unique situation, Daiute argues, we need new theory and new methods to create analyses that integrate individual and societal development. Cultural–historical activity theory, which forms the theoretical basis for the study, provides the needed shift from problems within the individual to broad causes and effects among institutions and political elites. From this perspective, authoritarian discourses, that is, views promoted by the state and cultural mores as applied to everyday realities, are an important influence on youth development. As these discourses change with political shifts, different ideas become persuasive to different generations. Daiute offers the example of an authoritarian discourse of wartime that persuades a 40-year-old man to deliver a death threat to a neighbor of a different religion who is reluctant to leave town. Such a man is likely to perceive with animosity the expelled neighbor's family returning to claim their house after the war. In contrast, the man's teenage children, persuaded by a postwar authoritarian discourse of social inclusion promoted at school and in the community center, may be curious and friendly toward the returning neighbors. New methods Daiute's “new methods” build on the idea that multiple, sometimes conflicting discourses interact in differing persuasive ways during the course of youth development. Her study explored these interacting discourses by asking young people to participate in research workshops that took place in three countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia) and a refugee community in the United States. The participants (ages 12 to 27) engaged in the Dynamic Story-Telling by Youth workshop, a six-hour series of group activities developed and piloted by Daiute in earlier work. The workshops were designed to engage participants as “social historians and critics,” sharing their experiences through narratives, evaluations of society, letters to public officials, debates, and collaborative inquiries. Children growing up in war-torn countries experience all the horrors such situations entail—loss of family and friends, homelessness, destruction of public buildings and other facilities, fear, discrimination
Book review
and violence. Violence, as Daiute notes, is a system, and like all systems, it creates realities that affect children and youth in different ways than those same realities affect adults. But Daiute's focus is not on her participants' problems, but on their perspectives, ideas, and plans for making a better world in the future. She argues that a sociohistorical analysis of young people's engagement in conflict and its aftermath “provides new insights about the effects of political violence and human development more generally.” In Daiute's view, human development is normative, even in war-affected environments, providing that at least some relationships are close, friendly, or stable, allowing children to take advantage of resources for exploring and mastering their environments. The Dynamic StoryTelling by Youth workshop serves as such a resource, and the products of the workshop help us to understand how young people in these different places, affected in unique ways by years of political conflict and violence, see themselves and their communities. As Daiute puts it, “we ask young people what is on their minds, rather than assume that they are damaged, dangerous, or holding onto collective memories of the past.” Daiute is not arguing that political violence is optimal, or even acceptable as a developmental context. She emphasizes the need to study young people in this context in ways that do not assume vulnerability or risk, not because vulnerability and risk are nonexistent, but because they do not tell the whole story of the effects of political violence on youth. Undoubtedly, children and youth are traumatized by the experiences of war. But trauma is not all that happens to them. In this book, Daiute focuses not on the ways young people cope with individual trauma, but on the ways they move forward as citizens, involving themselves in community activities and working to bring about positive changes for the future.
The workshops The format of the Dynamic Story-Telling by Youth workshop is an interesting one. Drawing on the cultural-historical perspectives of Vygotsky, Luria, and Bakhtin, Daiute acts on the assumption that the psychological life of an individual is inextricably entwined with public life in public space. Therefore, the workshops were designed around socially significant activities to “elicit participants’ engagement with social structures, obstacles, and opportunities.” In Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, they were put on with the cooperation of NonGovernmental Organizations (NGO's), which helped with recruiting participants and provided the community centers where the workshops took place. In the U.S, participants were from Bosnian Muslim immigrant families who had been settled in upstate New York by the U.S. State Department; the workshop took place in a Bosnian bakery. Activities in the workshops were focused around three genres: inquiry, narrative, and advisory. In the inquiry activities, participants responded to a researcherdeveloped survey about how they viewed society, reviewed and discussed results of the same survey previously taken by peers in one of Daiute's earlier studies, and created their own surveys about important issues in the lives of young people in the former Yugoslavia. Daiute's research team compiled the surveys created by all the groups of participants into one survey that was then posted on Surveymonkey.com and sent to all participants. In the narrative activities, participants wrote narratives about true experiences of peer and adult conflicts, and also produced fictional “community narratives” in which they completed a story starter that described the building of a new town center, the groundbreaking of which was interrupted by sudden news that “changed everything.” Participants were asked to finish the story, describing what the sudden news was and how the story turned out. Participants also discussed “public stories” based on actual events in the news in their respective countries. For the advisory activities, participants wrote letters to
87
public officials about issues that concerned them, and evaluated the workshop itself. Analyses of workshop products The book's unique organization takes some getting used to. Daiute does not, for example, devote one chapter, or even part of one chapter, to a complete analysis of each activity in the workshop. Instead, she divides her results and analyses of different activities (and even parts of activities) up among different chapters with different themes. For example, chapter 3, entitled “Living History,” describes participants' responses to some of the questions on the researcher-developed survey, as well as their narratives about adult conflicts. Responses to other questions on the researcher-developed survey are discussed in chapter 5, “Participation Matters,” along with participants’ designing of their own surveys, and their composing of letters to public officials. Narratives about peer conflict, the fictional community narratives, and adult conflict are all discussed in chapter 4, “Critical Narrating.” Shifts in discussion between one activity and another are sometimes hard to follow. Beyond the organizational issues, however, Daiute's analyses offer insightful ways to examine all the different activities her participants engaged in. The written narratives were analyzed on the basis of plots, settings, psychological state expressions (affective, cognitive/ sociocognitive, intention/anticipation), and psychosocial dynamics, such as identifying contradictions, expressing uncertainty over ongoing challenges, and suggesting injustice. The discussion of the surveys created by participants illustrates not only the many different topics generated by the groups, but the pragmatics, that is, the speech act (choose, explain, remember, project to future) implied in each question. Numerous other descriptive categories were used to characterize the output from the different workshop activities. But the most prominent analysis of the contents generated in the workshops was social script analysis. Daiute defines “social script” as a useful concept for examining how young people interpret the significant dynamics in their environments. Analyzing narratives for their social script involves indentifying the combined “plot-purpose organizing of a narrative: conflicts, resolutions, and causal connections” among plot elements. Daiute's analysis of all the participants' narratives revealed, in her view, three major scripts: 1) Tensions abound (in public life), 2) Moving beyond difficulties, and 3) Reflecting on social divisions. These scripts appeared to reflect context-specific developmental dilemmas in the sense that the narratives of participants in different countries reflected higher percentages of content that related to different scripts. Participants from Bosnia & Herzegovina most reflected the “tensions abound” script; in Daiute's view, this is consistent with the country's high death rates during the war, continued displacements, political instability, ethnic divisions, and poor economic situation. Narratives from Serbian participants strongly represented the “reflecting on social divisions” script, consistent with their awareness of tensions between “old vs. new” ideologies, the declaration of independent statehood by Montenegro and anticipation of a break for independence by Kosovo, as well as international pressure on Serbia to turn over war criminals. Participants from Croatia seemed most reflective of the “moving beyond difficulties” script, consistent with their country's status as a candidate nation for the European Union, something youth saw as involving both political-economic opportunities and personal losses related to a shift to a market economy. Though evidence of all three scripts was observed in the youth from the U.S. Bosnian immigrant group, their narratives and comments also reflected an Isolation script, based on recognition that they were better off financially and in terms of security in the U.S., but also faced discrimination based on their immigrant status and religion (they were mostly Muslims). Reflections on the scripts are found throughout the book, as participants identify not only their concerns, but also their ideas for exploring those concerns (creating a survey) and
88
Book review
their proposed solutions (letters to officials). Daiute describes her workshops as involving “interactive, purposeful activity with cultural tools for figuring out what is going on in the world, how one fits, and how one can change circumstances for the better.” Possibly due to this approach, which indeed takes the young people seriously, she finds her participants describing their circumstances as frustrating rather than debilitating, and responding to those circumstances with agency rather than despondency. In other words, they are down, but definitely not out.
Conclusion This is qualitative research, so there is no claim made that the results are representative or generalizable in the traditional, quantitative sense. Both the results and the analyses reflect the views of the participants, including Daiute as participant observer. There is no evidence, for example, that Daiute's categorizations of issues raised in the narratives are corroborated by anyone else, (i.e., there is no evidence of inter-rater reliability) and her own views and theoretical perspective color the analyses she makes. At times, it is difficult to separate her views from those of the young writers; at others, however, their voices are clear and vibrant. Daiute's interpretations reflect her extensive knowledge of the geopolitical issues of the region and the ways in which young people's narratives illustrate their insights and concerns. The book as a whole illustrates not only how qualitative research is done, but why—these young people occupy a unique place in history, and they must be heard for themselves, regardless of the generalizability of their experiences to other places and times. Traditional quantitative methods would not give us the depth of understanding that Daiute's “new methods” allow. What is most fascinating about this book, however, is the workshop approach itself, which allowed the participants to shape the information gathered (by writing their own surveys), analyze the views of other participants, and “speak truth to power” by conveying
their own views to government officials. The experience appears to have been an energizing one for the participants; one said, “I feel powerful thinking about others' responses to a survey I completed a little while ago.” This workshop format, with its emphasis on what young people have to offer rather than what they have to recover from, could be a positive approach among many groups, such as survivors of disasters or human trafficking. It would also be interesting to know more about the long-term impact of this experience on the young people who participated. All of the non-U.S. participants in this study were recruited through NGOs in their countries; these organizations were responsible for creating the community centers where the workshops took place, and many of the participants were already volunteering with a variety of community projects sponsored by the centers. So it can be argued that these young people were likely among the most resilient of the young survivors of the Yugoslavia wars. Possibly they were not the ones most seriously traumatized, nor are they likely to be among those who act out the violence they have experienced by turning to crime or other violent activity. But they nevertheless experienced, and survived, the same events as everyone else, and we need their perspectives for a complete picture of the effects of political violence on development. As a participant observer, Daiute's views and interpretations of the young people's responses are clearly a part of the picture she paints. It is an interesting and hopeful picture, and one that shows youth surviving wartime not as victims, but as citizens of a new day. Bridget A. Franks 1215 Norman Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, United States E-mail address: [email protected]fl.edu. 7 December 2010