Many areas of the globe today face continuous armed conflict, with more and more populations caught in the crossfire. This has been true in both Afghanistan and Burundi where populations have to cope with the psychological and social effects of ongoing collective violence. While living and working in these countries, the author conducted research on the impact of these complex humanitarian emergencies on mental health and psychosocial wellbeing, and on ways to miti gate these impacts.
His findings as published in this PhD thesis are based on the following questions:

Chapter in: 'The new yearbook of the International Tracing Service (ITS)'. This book focuses on the spatial dimension of the Holocaust and other mass crimes committed by the Nazis.

This study examined the content of self-defining autobiographical memories in different identities in patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and comparison groups of patients with PTSD, healthy controls, and DID simulators. Consistent with the DID trauma model, analyses of objective ratings showed that DID patients in trauma identities retrieved more negative and trauma-related self-defining memories than DID patients in avoidant identities.

An earlier study (Dückers, Alisic, & Brewin, 2016) found that countries with greater social and economic resources were characterized by a higher lifetime prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Here, we present a similar analysis of national population survey data to examine this vulnerability paradox in relation to other disorders. We predicted the lifetime prevalence of any mental health disorder (i.e., anxiety, mood, substance, and externalizing disorders) in 17 countries based on trauma exposure and country vulnerability data.