Today’s global situation serves as a reminder that conflict and war, ranging from tribal fights to international hostilities, are seemingly inescapable social facts woven throughout the course of human history. In all their shapes and forms, conflict and war have an existential impact on society, as both individual and collective existence are at stake. The cost of survival can be extremely high and often leaves long-lasting effects, pointing to the depth of actual and potential wounds—from the individual to the societal levels.
The contributions to this Research Topic reflect a wide geographical range, underscoring that the societal and individual costs of war unfold across cultures and nations. The articles are authored by scholars based in, and engage empirically or analytically with, a diverse set of regional contexts, including the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland/Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine, Israel, Australia, and the United States. Taken together, this breadth reinforces the opening assertion that conflict and war are woven throughout human history, while highlighting their enduring and transnational impact across contemporary societies.
Conflict and war inflict both visible and invisible wounds that can negatively affect an individual’s health and well-being. From our combined research and professional experiences, clinically diagnosable conditions and non-clinical/non-diagnosable illnesses or conditions typically co-exist, with direct consequences to the individual and unintended consequences to their family and their broader community. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be regarded as a prototypical psychiatric and clinical diagnosis. Its precursors became visible in various forms during the First and Second World Wars, and the diagnosis was later formally codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the 1980s . More recent hypothesized constructs have since emerged. Constructs such as moral injury encompass experiences grounded in a distinct etiology and possibly also in specific neurobiological processes.
Hence, the wounds of conflict and war cannot be understood solely through a clinical lens, as was early recognized by clinicians Shay and Munroe (1998), who worked with U.S. Vietnam veterans; they must also be interpreted through moral and identity-related perspectives. This call for an interdisciplinary approach has been a longstanding invitation. For as Waller (1944) observed in his study of U.S. veterans from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World I, interdisciplinary perspectives are required to address the myriad of challenges surrounding the homecoming journey of veterans. We hold the same view in this Research Topic: divergent viewpoints or conceptual frameworks are needed to convergently grasp the heavy toll of conflict and war, including its profound effects in the deepest layers of human identity and existence. In doing so, we begin to gain a full appreciation of the path back from conflict and war—and the potential healing of visible and invisible injuries.
The mismatch between the complexities and diversities of human experience, on the one hand, and the pursuit of precise scientific solutions, on the other—some of which are profitable—provides fertile ground for an imaginative, progressive, interdisciplinary medical sociological approach.
This Research Topic brings together an international cadre of researchers from sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and other fields engaged in cutting-edge research focused on the costs of war, broadening our understanding of the societal and individual wounds of war.
Frontiers Media S.A., 2026. , p. 342