Victor Igreja

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• PhD
• Senior Scholar at University of Southern Queensland

The existing literature on post-civil war processes has inadequately addressed the diversity of challenges of social reconstruction and community development arising from the fragmentation of cultural practices informing the creation and maintenance of family and social networks, and a variety of locally specific risks impacting the lives of surviv...

The mental health needs of young people in sub-Saharan African societies remain understudied. This study builds upon the everyday perspectives of young people in Gorongosa, a rural district in central Mozambique, to determine the frequency and severity of key mental health issues, identify significant risk and protective factors, and their associat...

The civil war of 1976–1992 pitted the ruling communist party, Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frente de Libertaçäo de Moçambique, FRELIMO), against the rebel movement, Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, RENAMO). After the conflict, the two belligerent parties opted to reject accountability through transitional justice...

Politics of accountability and embodied accountability

The global circulation of discourses of accountability and of formal declarations of guilt for serious crimes are often decoupled from the historical realities of nations undergoing major political transitions. In contexts marred by multiple historical waves of violence, intersecting cultures of guilt formation, and a myriad of actors, the shared r...

Civilian populations constitute the majority of victims in civil wars in Africa and around the world. Following peace agreements, one of the main concerns of war survivors and their offspring focus on attempts to rebuild broken relationships. Around the world, post-war rebuilding has centered around struggles to implement official mechanisms of tru...

This chapter focuses on how religious imaginaries have fueled and contained grievances and political violence in post-conflict countries. Contrary to long-held beliefs that religion and religious practices would wane with the rise of twin processes of secularization and modernization, diverse religious movements have emerged worldwide and expanded...

The end of the Cold War raised the profiles of international tribunals and truth commissions as official mechanisms for dealing with the legacies of political violence around the world. However, these mechanisms have the tendency to generate somewhat stark accounts of the past and present, and of guilt and heroism, and are thus an inadequate forum...

Community processes to address fractured social relationships and well‐being remain the least examined dimensions in studies of legacies of civil wars. This article addresses these limitations by analyzing how the wartime and postwar generations have negotiated the legacies of the civil war (1976–1992) in a farming economy region in Mozambique. Bas...

Research Group Global Contestations of Women’s and Gender Rights for up to ten months in the academic year 2020/2021

In conflict-ridden communities, justice specialists gather evidence through verbal accounts and material vestiges of violations committed by repressive regimes and during warfare, to eventually lay legal charges against alleged perpetrators. Anthropologists and sociologists engage with similar contexts but have included conventional bodily rituals,...

Public lecture: On Edge: Towards an Affective Geopolitics of Bordering

This chapter discusses the social dimensions of war trauma and recovery through the examples of Mozambique, with a detailed focus on the Gorongosa, a district in the center of the country, and Uganda, specifically, Gulu district. Both countries are exemplary of how state actors and civilians struggle to come to terms with experiences of mass politi...

Igreja outlines a rationale for, and elaborates a framework for engaging with, the subsequent chapters in this work. Several different ways in which the nexus among place, conflict and communication are manifested conceptually and empirically are proposed and illustrated. Framing and informing studies of this nexus are crucial for rendering visible...

The world abounds with conflicts and the associated communication practices and technologies that perpetuate and contest conflict as it occurs in place. All conflicts are crucially connected with place, and all conflicts are communicated in multiple ways. This book explores the complex nexus among place, conflict and communication and brings togeth...

Worldwide, spirit possession has multiple meanings which have propelled scholars to use diverse theoretical perspectives to interpret and explain it. Interpretations based on symbolism have evolved over time. Instrumental interpretations considered spirit possession as strategies used by marginalized groups to struggle for recognition. Holistic app...

In spite of the growing public focus on domestic violence (DV) in mainstream Australian society, ethnographers have remained aloof from analysing this problem. In an ethnographic study in the Brisbane region, I analysed people’s perceptions of anti-violence images that were part of a public campaign and assessed the appropriateness of the images’ l...

Students of anthropologies of Africa would have frequently heard the everyday expression, ‘one leg does not dance alone’. Many Africans often like to reiterate the collective nature of their endeavours, even if this is not always the case, so that, to return to the proverb, the origin and durability, type and size, and gender and colour of the seco...

Mass political violence such as civil wars generates physical destruction, forced population movements, human rights violations and crimes, as well as immense individual and collective suffering on a global scale. In response, sometimes national, regional and international humanitarian organisations have intervened by implementing humanitarian proj...

This article examines the phenomenon of informal video houses showing action films with scenes of violence to young people in Gorongosa, a district in the center of Mozambique. Recent socioeconomic interventions and development in the region have occurred in tandem with the growing popularity of violent action films among young people, which has be...

Two decades after the negotiated peace accord and amnesty law that ended the civil war (1976–1992) between the Frelimo government and the rebel group Renamo, an armed conflict (2013–2014) broke out between Frelimo and Renamo military forces. While in the 1990s the pacification process was locally and internationally celebrated as a successful trans...

Following a long-term analysis of diverse divination practices in central Mozambique, this article examines how the civil war (1976–1992) and developments since the war’s end (2004–2010), which triggered new forms of consumption of mass-media technologies such as television and film, significantly changed the role played by clients, their visual se...

The concept of hybridity has been used in different ways in discussions of colonialism and its enduring legacies in postcolonial societies. The concept has also been used in discussions of churches and other faith-based organisations in these societies, particularly with respect to their role in service delivery. The history of missionisation has c...

A book, in Portuguese, part of the series "Desafios para Moçambique" (Challenges for Mozambique), edited by the leading research coordinators of the Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IESE). The book is always organized into four major blocks: politics, economics, society and the world. This series aims at transforming research into analysi...

This article explores how accusations of cannibalism in post-conflict Mozambique, which were leveled in the context of individually driven and protracted struggles, albeit with cultural spinoffs, have contributed to ongoing and contested forms of social transformation in the country. The accusations were accentuated by the mobilizing effects of mem...

This article analyses how state and non-state actors have tried to address the human rights violations and war crimes committed during the civil war in Mozambique (1976–92). While the political elite opted for amnesty laws, and urban civil society organisations remained largely on the sidelines, in rural areas, war survivors and the post-war genera...

This article explores the contradictory processes that arise from projects of democratic decentralisation in the contexts of those post-civil war, emergent pluralistic democracies and ruling elites that typically strive to officially maintain essentialist forms of national unity, identity and commemorations. These contradictions significantly shape...

Researchers committed to the understanding of current social processes in African societies have ascertained that spirits feature persistently in political, economic and social action—either as subtle subtext or in decidedly apparent ways. Spirits’ involvement is evident in divination ceremonies in grassroots environments but also noted to determin...

Responses to Mozambique's 1976-1992 civil war and its multiple legacies have taken place in different social and political contexts over time. This article analyses responses developed during wartime and in the postwar context in Gorongosa, a district in the centre of Mozambique. Mainstream transitional justice literature has tended to ground analy...

This study explores the therapeutic implications of including culturally adapted spiritual ceremonies in the process of testimonial therapy for torture survivors in India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and the Philippines. Data were collected through an action research process with Asian mental health and human rights organizations, during which the testimo...

The role of violence in sustaining the political projects of state ruling elites in Mozambique and, more broadly, sub-Saharan Africa, remains under researched. In Mozambique, many of the authors of the literature produced in the 1980s avoided writing about the issue of Frelimo's use of violence and the numbers and identities of the victims. This ar...

In the Mozambican context of the state amnesty for civil war crimes, war survivors have used their local ethics of reciprocity to create justice. This article analyses how survivors have attempted to persuade judges in traditional courts to adjudicate in serious wartime disputes. These judges, who have no official mandate to redress wartime offence...

Exploring the ethics of memory as cultivated by national political elites and ordinary survivors of mass political violence, this article analyses the role of memories and the implications for sustainable peace and reconciliation in Mozambique. It argues that in the aftermath of civil war and totalitarian political repression, a combination of cult...

This paper focuses on gendered processes of socialization experienced by Christian religious groups in different Christian churches in post-civil war Gorongosa, a district in the centre of Mozambique. Discourses of radical social transformation through Christian interventions and experiences are prominent among Christians, both men and women. Yet a...

The influence of physical activity on the prevalence and remission of war-related mental disturbances has never been systematically evaluated. This study examined the influence of participation in the agricultural cycle on the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prevalence and correlated symptoms longitudinally in post civil war Mozambique. Preval...

In the aftermath of the protracted Mozambican civil war (1976–1992), the national political authorities opted for an unconditional amnesty law for wartime crimes. Neither the cadres from the Frelimo-led government, nor the Renamo leadership offered public explanations as to why no politico-legal initiatives were to be forthcoming in the post-civil...

Political and legal debates over the value of official silence in the aftermath of civil wars are inconclusive. On the one hand, official silence is considered disrespectful to the memory of the victims and an impediment to establishing a culture of accountability and respect for human rights. On the other, silence is regarded as instrumental to ac...

This article describes the ways in which in post‐civil war Gorongosa (central Mozambique), women (and occasionally men) with personal and/or family experiences of extreme suffering are the focal point of possession by male, war‐related spirits named gamba . However, gamba spirits also create post‐war healing in which memory work and gender politics...

This article explores the psychosocial effects of women's prolonged exposure to civil war in the center of Mozambique. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, 91 women were assessed for posttraumatic stress symptoms and psychosocial indicators of ill health. The results indicate that for the majority of the women in this study,...

The effectiveness of the testimony method has not been established in rural communities with survivors of prolonged civil war. To examine the effectiveness and feasibility of a testimony method to ameliorate post-traumatic stress symptoms. Participants (n=206) belonged to former war zones in Mozambique. They were divided into a case (n=137) and a n...

In the wake of a civil war, local resources can play a potential role in shaping the recovery process by providing both old and new exegeses for the disturbing effects of the past. Using the case of Gorongosa, this article aims to explore the ways in which the war has impacted upon traditional medicine by creating Gamba spirits that cause havoc but...

This article addresses the ways in which years of war and periods of serious drought have affected the cultural representations of the populations in Gorongosa District, Mozambique. In the wake of these events different cultural and historical representations have been disrupted, leaving the members of these communities with fragmented protective a...

The study of the practice of shamans can enrich theory and practices of «western» psychoanalytic therapy in several respects. Giving the example of the procedures of a shaman treating a heavily traumatized child soldier, healing aspects of these rituals are discussed and made usable for the theory of functional and dysfunctional processes of grieva...

Die Beschäftigung mit schamanischen Praktiken Kann Theorie und Praxis der ‹‹westlichen›› psychoalytischen Therapie in vielfacher Hinsicht bereicher. Am Beispiel des Vorgehens eines Schamanen bei einem schwer traumatisierten Kindersoldaten werden heilende Elemente dieser Rituale diskutiert und fϋr die Theorie von gelingenden und miẞlingenden Trauerp...

The most important psychiatric implication of experiencing trauma during war is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The core symptoms of PTSD are intrusive re-experiencing of traumatic events, hyperarousal in reaction to minor stimuli and avoidance of trauma-related triggers. In this paper we describe the phenomenon of intrusive reexperiencing,...

This paper, 1 which results from nearly a decade (1997-2006) of continuous field research in the centre of Mozambique, analyses the ways in which Mozambican war survivors managed to develop socio-cultural approaches to deal peacefully with the legacies of an extremely violent past. More specifically, it focuses on the contributions of a civil-war-r...

This study examines the social world of reconciliation and healing in the aftermath of the protracted Mozambican civil war. Using a multidisciplinary approach (sociology, history, legal and medical anthropology, and international law) this research explores how reconciliation and healing unfold contributing to the repair of a devastated social worl...