Gilbert Holleufer joined the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1987. As a communication advisor to the directorate at the ICRC Headquarters, he participated in the implementation of the People on War project, a large-scale attempt to document the responses of civilian populations in war-torn areas.
In 1999, Holleufer says, the ICRC conducted a survey of twelve thousand people in twelve war-torn countries and eight thousand people in peaceful countries in an effort to capture the experience and perceptions of men and women who have been exposed to substate wars.
The study found, according to Holleufer, that in all substate war situations, there is a complete dissolution of the distinction between a daily battlefield and a safe home front. The overall collapse of social relations into communal violence leads to levels of violence that the people had previously thought unimaginable. "We're not talking about impersonal, long-distance killing," Holleufer says, "but about close combat, sniping, humiliation, extreme danger in every street, every village." Respondents' self-reports indicate that overwhelming battle-related suffering and humiliation inevitably fuels protracted cycles of retributive violence.
Drawing on the responses of focus group members who participated in the study, Holleufer suggests that there are profound differences between men and women in terms of how they experience war. There appears to be a pattern indicating that women recognize the traumatic experience that the men went through and that each of these broken men is an essential link of the social fabric. In the aftermath of war, according to Holleufer, women are better able to cope. They are the ones who pick up the pieces, while the men are "just sitting back, doing nothing, drinking and smoking."
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