This paper examines the added-value that multisystem approaches bring to research and intervention in contexts of war and forced displacement. I highlight what is useful and truly innovative about systems-level work, aware that providing data-related evidence is only part of the story when connecting research to policy and practice. I discuss four types of added-value: these are conceptual, instrumental, capacity-building, and connectivity impacts that, respectively, aim to change current knowledge, improve implementation, build research skills, and strengthen network connectivity. Specifically, systems-based research can help transform the key frames of humanitarian work, fostering the more integrated and distributive models of professional assistance known as resilience and network humanitarianism. I argue that systems-level approaches on resilience and flourishing in war-affected and refugee populations help to articulate new mindsets, methodologies, partnerships, and ways of working relevant for humanitarian research, policy and practice. I focus attention on interdisciplinary, interventionist, prospective, transgenerational, and network-building initiatives. My specific examples cover the family context of mental health and trauma memory in Afghanistan, as well as program evaluation with Syrian refugees in Jordan, connecting stress biology to human experience, and social networks to psychological empowerment. The paper suggests future directions to support more effective and impactful systems-level work in protracted humanitarian crises.

Contested from the early period of Menelik territorial expansion into the hinterlands of Addis Ababa, areas in the vicinity of Suba Park continue to be a bone of political contention in the context of the struggle of Oromo people against the expansion of the central state. A flashpoint is the Oromo protests (2014–2018) against federal state territorial expansion into the Oromo ethnic territory through a new Addis Ababa Master Plan that led to the deposition of Haile Mariam Desalegn and the installation of Abiy Amhed. I investigate how the state environmental policy maintained for extraction and conservation in the Suba forest between the late 1890s and 2018 affected the Tulama modes of land use related to their worldviews and their use of material, social, spiritual and symbolic values of land in the struggle for land and resource rights. I used ethnographic methods that included in-depth and semi-structured interviews, participant observations and document analysis to investigate long-standing and complex land-based conflicts in and around Suba Park. I show how simplifying state narratives of environmental policy entrenched in centralized state administration and exclusionist resource management schemes have reinforced a wider concern about indigenous land and resource rights and decentralized environmental governance.

It is often argued that governments take advantage of extreme events to expand their power to the detriment of the political opposition and citizens at large. Violations of constitutional constraints are a clear indication of such opportunistic behaviour. We study whether natural disasters, conflicts and other extreme events systematically diminish governments' compliance with constitutional constraints. Our results indicate that governments are most likely to overstep their competences or disregard their responsibilities during civil conflicts, at the onset of international sanctions or following successful coups d’état. Interestingly, Cold War interventions by the United States that installed or supported a political leader led to a decrease in constitutional compliance in the target country, whereas Soviet interventions had no such effect. In contrast, banking crises and natural disasters, which threaten societies at large, but not necessarily the political elite, do not cause a significant decline in constitutional compliance.

Supportive supervision has been shown to improve mental health outcomes and job retention for mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) workers in humanitarian contexts. However, the impact of gender on supervision practices has been poorly evaluated and documented in international guidelines to date. To address this gap, qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 MHPSS staff working in diverse humanitarian contexts to identify key gender considerations in supportive supervision. Results show that gender in supervision is influenced by the context of MHPSS work; with culture, religion and gender roles identified as key elements. Participants discuss recruitment mechanisms, highlighting the unequal gender distribution and inequitable opportunities within MHPSS programming. The importance of addressing power dynamics impacted by gender and of ensuring the safety of women within supervision is also highlighted. Finally, participants discuss the gender differences across the various supervisory formats. Altogether, results indicate that gender has the potential to influence supportive supervision within MHPSS, and it is recommended that international guidelines account for nuances of gender in supportive supervision within humanitarian contexts.

Why do some people resolve disputes through the state, while others use religious or customary justice? We address this question by conducting a vignette experiment in Kosovo. We design hypothetical situations in which fictitious characters are involved in disputes regarding inheritance, debt, domestic violence, and murder. We vary information concerning (i) vignette characters’ resources, (ii) their beliefs about the efficiency of state justice, and (iii) dispute settlement customs in the characters’ communities. Survey respondents assess whether a vignette character is likely to seek informal justice, given the described circumstances. We find that respondents associate informal justice with characters who believe that the state would resolve their disputes very slowly, and whose other community members would not use state justice. These findings generalize to respondents’ own justice preferences and patterns of actual informal dispute settlement in Kosovo and beyond. Our article highlights efficiency concerns and local conventions as explanations of informal justice.

Family functioning may serve as protective or risk factors in the development of youth psychopathology. However, few studies have examined the potentially reciprocal relation between child psychopathology and family functioning. To fill this gap in the literature, this study tested for time-ordered associations between measures of family functioning (e.g., cohesion, conflict, and emotional expressiveness) and child psychopathology (e.g., total behavior problems, externalizing, and internalizing problems) using data from the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN; N = 1143, 52.3% female, Nwaves = 5). We used a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to identify whether child psychopathology preceded and predicted family functioning, the reverse, or both processes occurred simultaneously. At the between-person level, families who tended to have more cohesion, who lacked conflict, and who expressed their emotions had lower levels of child psychopathology. At the within-person level in childhood, we found minimal evidence for time-ordered associations. In adolescence, however, a clear pattern whereby early psychopathology consistently predicted subsequent family functioning emerged, and the reverse direction was rarely found. Results indicate a complex dynamic relation between the family unit and child that have important implications for developmental models that contextualize risk and resilience within the family unit.

Discussions of terrorism assume actual or threatened violence, but the term is regularly used to delegitimize rivals' nonviolent actions. Yet do ordinary citizens accept descriptions of nonviolence as terrorism? Using a preregistered survey-experiment in Israel, a salient conflictual context with diverse repertoires of contention, we find that audiences rate adversary nonviolence close to terrorism, consider it illegitimate, and justify its forceful repression. These perceptions vary by the action's threatened harm, its salience, and respondents' ideology. Explicitly labeling nonviolence as terrorism, moreover, particularly sways middle-of-the-road centrists. These relationships replicate in a lower-salience conflict, albeit with milder absolute judgments, indicating generalizability. Hence, popular perceptions of terrorism are more fluid and manipulable than assumed, potentially undermining the positive effects associated with nonviolent campaigns.

Conflict can be both a productive and detrimental reality of design collaboration. While most studies on conflict characterize findings by type (conflict about the task, process, or interpersonal relationships), we extend this typology to understand the causes, topics, and outcomes of conflict. To do so, we analyze communications in a virtual chat platform, collected in a hybrid work environment. A thematic analysis on over 6000 messages between student design teams on the enterprise communication platform Slack revealed three emergent conflict themes: Engineering Design, Project Management, and Communication. A mapping of the themes to a widely-cited typology of conflict found an over- representation of task (productive) and process (detrimental) conflict in the Engineering Design and Project Management themes, respectively. The distribution of types of conflict in the Communication theme is representative of the entire dataset, suggesting that communication can be a cause and outcome in all types of conflict. Overall, our classification of conflict is the first step towards describing triads of the causes, topics, and outcomes of conflict, a contribution which will drive the development of interventions for design team conflict.

This article studies the process of constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir as a hegemonic process dominated by, and an ideological reflection of, the dominant political party of Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference led by the popular leader Sheikh Abdullah. The Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir emerged as an outcome of their ideas. Though the process itself was punctuated by the exclusionary violence against diverse communities present in the state at that time, very little attention has been paid to the idea of a constitution as an exclusivist text that embeds ‘foundational violence’ within it, and that eliminates dissenting groups and prevents the inclusion of plural conceptions of politics by actualizing a monopolistic discourse in favour of the dominant party. This article locates the violence that went into constitution-making and further employs hermeneutical interpretation of the Constituent Assembly Debates of Jammu and Kashmir to locate the differing viewpoints that existed in the State Constituent Assembly. It also takes the surrounding political and ideological context into account. In doing so, it constructs an alternative and ‘unofficial’ version of the constitution-making process, which helps challenge the dominant historical narrative that the constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir was a successful experiment in Indian federal democracy.