"Most people living in conflict areas have experienced armed incidents, poverty, displacement, as well as witnessed torture and killings. However, only certain forms of suffering are publicly acknowledged and may lead to prestige and a strengthened social position within a community, or grant political asylum in the country of refuge. Expressions of suffering and pain are therefore seldom the mere expressions of personal suffering as they are often integrated into a standardized discourse of victimhood and heroism. Taking the two decades of conflict between the Kurdish Workers Party PKK and the Turkish State as point of departure, this projects elaborates on the effects such standardization or silencing of violent experience have on the processing of violent experience – for the individual and the social community at large. Grounded in the anthropology of violence, and based on a two years comparative research in Turkey and Denmark, this multisited and interdisciplinary research aims at understanding how expressions of violence are determined and influenced by social processes such as nationalist discourses, ongoing conflict and migration. Suffering that has no place within a public discourse, is silenced, the body often being the last resort to express the unspeakable. How then do individuals cope with their pain that has been politicized, publicized and collectivized; what happens, when suffering is regarded illegitime, or a sign for weakness and shame? An understanding of these mechanisms is crucial to better understand the violent dynamics in post-conflict societies, as well as to assess difficulties in integration of traumatized refugees. Insight in how violence is understood, coped with and expressed is thus an essential part of assessing and preventing violence in the first place."