Psychological analysis of the consequences of armed conflicts: domestic and foreign experience

there are few recent studies on the psychological impact of armed conflicts on civilians, as well as strategies for coping with their traumatic experiences. The gender and age aspects of the problem are poorly studied. In recent years (2021-2024), attempts have been made to study the peculiarities of psychological consequences of armed conflicts, manifested in women and men of different ages, as well as vulnerable categories of the population – children, young and elderly people. Objective: to analyze current psychological research on the effects of armed conflicts on civilians, as well as strategies for coping with their traumatic experiences. For a person living in an armed conflict zone, vital values (physiological needs, life, health, safety, personal inviolability, etc.) and civil rights (freedom of speech, thought, conscience, inviolability of the home, etc.) become the main values. Armed conflict is an extremely strong psychotraumatic event for a person's personality, characterized by a wide variety of stressors and possibly leading to the transformation of his entire personality. Under the influence of stressors of the military conflict a person experiences certain physiological reactions, which can seriously and inevitably transform his or her value and meaning sphere, disrupt the usual perception of reality, thus destroying faith in the future and depriving him or her of the desire to build life prospects. Strong traumatic events entail the breakdown or transformation of the system of values, beliefs, perceptions of the world and of oneself, which in the absence of a replacement can lead to destructive manifestations. The desire to compensate for this catastrophe can be realized in several ways: in the form of an attempt to preserve the former system of beliefs and values or in the form of revision and creation of a new, more flexible and viable system. The meaningful experience acquired by a person in a traumatic situation becomes a burden for him in a more favorable situation, a heavy life load, which is rejected by him as something alien and foreign. Therefore, the study of changes in the functioning of personality in the conditions of psychotraumatic experience of the internal armed conflict is mandatory in the study of the transformation of meanings in the conditions of the armed conflict and in the post-conflict period.

armed conflict, civilian population, stress, value-meaning sphere, personal transformations