Trauma of Conflict Victims and Criminal Prosecutions in Nigeria: Discourse on Post-Conflict Transformation

The aim of this paper is to examine the pursuance of criminal prosecutions after a conflict in healing the trauma of conflict victims to rebuild societies. In most conflict situations, there are different types of victims, thousands of people lose their lives, displace, rape, torture and detain or forcibly disappear. While other people will continue suffer from Trauma of Conflict Victimization. Therefore, the lack of accountability, criminal justice, rule of law can lead to widespread violation of human rights and crime against the law. This paper is qualitative in context, nature, and structure; hence Library Research method and content analysis were adopted and carried out to review the data acquired and evaluate the studies originality. The paper adopted theory of peace making criminology to understand and explain the process of healing conflict victims’ trauma in post-conflict transformation situations. The study revealed that, in some cases such as Kenya, Nigeria and South Sudan conflict, the crimes under international law and other serious human rights violations and abuses were committed. The findings also revealed that prosecutions of war criminals and human rights abusers will promote peace and prevent conflict victimization. Furthermore, Post-conflict transformation contain peace building and requires the development of rules, norms that transform potentially violent actors in to non-violent actors and support political, economic, social and military measures and structures aiming to redress the root causes of conflict. The study recommended that, post-conflict policy efforts should focus on peace building, because that is how the warring parties could be settled, negotiation can be facilitated with the armed groups, and the victims could be empowered and compensated. The paper also recommended that the rule of law should not only serve the rights of dominant social groups while leaving other minority groups behind in the post-conflict settings and international institutions should take into cognizance such issues as the entitlements of groups that are vulnerable to marginalization and discrimination- minority groups, women and children, internally or internationally displaced persons and refugees- in a conflict setting or a country.