Winning this award is a particular honor for this research group, as Prof. Dr. Andreas Hamburger expressed: “It is anything but expected for a US-American association to recognize a book from a London publisher with European publishers and authors.” At the IPU, Prof. Dr. Hamburger teaches developmental theory and interventions. He released the book together with Camellia Hancheva, Saime Özçürümez, Carmen Scher, Biljana Stanković and Slavica Tutnjević. 

Forced Migration and Social Trauma contains a broad range of interdisciplinary and international contributions from psychoanalysis, refugee care, trauma research, sociology and public policy from all along the Balkan refugee route into Europe. Forced Migration is traumatic not only in its country of origin, but also in transit or target countries, frequently determined by the traumatic social history of these countries. This book shows how xenophobia in the countries receiving or transiting refugees can be caused by projection rather than by experience, and may lead to unconscious institutional defenses, such as lack of cooperation between medical, psychotherapeutic, humanitarian and legal institutions.

This volume emerged from the Network on Social Trauma, which the IPU Berlin has been running with universities from the Balkans since 2012 with the support of the DAAD.