Dr. Patrick Christian is a psychoanalytic anthropologist with a doctorate in the psychopathology of ethnic and cultural violence. He has spent the past 36 years conducting field research in Eurasia, Southwest Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Horn of Africa, the Central Sahel, the Andean Mountains, the Amazon Basin, and Mesoamerica, as part of military, diplomatic, and humanitarian interventions in violent intra-state conflicts. With the exceptions of India, Iran and Russia, Dr Christian has personally lived in and/or worked in each country he specialises in.
Dr. Christian is a member of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, Race, Conflict, and Violence.
Dr Christian’s work applies anthropology, psychology, and sociology to curate scientific understanding of specific subject communities’ lived-experiences – mentally and emotionally. His reporting illuminates the underlying psychosocial-emotional motivations behind individual and collective behaviour, both post-mortem and predictive of violent conflict.
Dr Christian’s field research focuses on civil-conflict psychoanalysis, sociological ethnography, and psychosocial profiling of population segments vulnerable to traumatic weaponisation as suicidal and kamikaze combatants. He tracks the psychological and social devolution of civilian communities sufficient to induce large numbers of asylees into forced immigration.
As founder and director of the non-profit Valka-Mir Human Security Foundation www.valka-mir.com, Dr Christian leads a 34-member team of PhD researchers and field assistants with expertise in the countries listed.
His areas of expertise include the psychosocial conditions of child abuse; sexual abuse/assault; gender-based violence/domestic violence; child soldiers; forced marriage; human trafficking; FGM/FGC; trafficking; forced conscription/refoulment; ex-combatant reintegration; likelihood of destitution or homelessness; land tenure disputes/issues; ethnic, religious, or tribal discrimination or persecution; risk of torture or political persecution; risk from state actors, risk from non-state actors; risk of retaliation; sufficiency of protection; possibility of safe internal relocation; healthcare access; health systems capacity; mental illness
Dr. Christian serves as the director of field research for the Valka-Mir Foundation, leading a 27-member research consortium of post-docs, PhD candidates, and students to collect and analyse data relevant to the psychosocial-emotional conditions of specific ethnic and cultural societies. He and the foundation are under contracts with the USA, UK, Canada, and NATO member states for research, development, and training of psychosocial cultural analysis. As an individual contributor, Dr. Christian has researched more than 94 country-of-origin reports for immigration courts in the USA, UK, Netherlands, and Canada, many of which required virtual testimony.
He is widely published in his field of praxis via peer reviewed journals, books, book chapters, and professional publications published within the USA, UK, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Hague. He is a member of ORCID.org ID: 0000-0002-8541-9155