Building reflective professional culture in a post-conflict context International group analytic training and institutional development, Rwamagana, Rwanda, 2023–2027

Since 2023, Krisna Catsaras (KCGA’s principal consultant) has been part of a small team of group analysts delivering a sustained training programme in group analysis to psychologists, nurses, social workers, and other health professionals in Rwanda, in partnership with a British-based, Rwandan-led organisation working to rebuild the lives of survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi, and a number of local, survivor-led organisations. The programme, which began in 2014 and has grown into a multi-year qualifying training, works with professionals whose daily practice brings them into sustained contact with the consequences of the genocide and its intergenerational aftermath. The groups students run address the full range of what the genocide and its aftermath have produced: forms of loss, trauma, stigma, and intergenerational consequence that are still being lived, still being understood, and still being worked through. The students are themselves living and working within that same history.

The work operates at multiple intersecting levels simultaneously. Students learn through their own therapy groups, large groups, work discussion groups, and theory seminars — experiencing as participants the very processes they are learning to facilitate. The training team holds what emerges across all of these levels: the weight of the material the students bring from their practice, the dynamics of learning in a context saturated with collective trauma, and the ongoing questions of how a body of theory developed elsewhere can be genuinely useful here.

That group analysis — a tradition with particular European roots — is being practised and taught in this context is not a neutral fact, and the programme doesn't treat it as one. Students are encouraged to engage critically with what they are learning, to test it against their own clinical experience and cultural understanding, and to integrate or adapt it as they see fit. They bring to that process their own professional formation, their own knowledge of their context, and their own judgment. The aim is assimilation on their terms — not replication of a model.

The longer-term organisational purpose of the programme is the development of a locally-led training institute, with authority and ownership transferred to Rwandan professionals and their organisations. This transition — currently underway — is itself a complex organisational and relational process, engaging dynamics around dependency and independence, the anxiety of separation, and emerging questions of local leadership and authority. Remaining genuinely responsive to the needs and wishes of the Rwandan partners, while maintaining appropriate boundaries and sustaining the integrity of the training, requires continuous attentiveness to what is happening at every level of the system. This is among the most demanding and consequential work in this portfolio of practices.

Institutional capacity building — group analytic training — post-conflict context — intercultural and postcolonial complexity — organisational transition