Strengthening resilience for people affected by violence in international armed conflict: A community-based MHPSS intervention in Armenia

Since 2021, the Armenian Red Cross Society (ARCS) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have been jointly implementing a community-based mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) programme. The intervention targets border communities and people from Karabakh affected by the 2020 Karabakh conflict and subsequent escalations. Implemented collaboratively by partners of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the programme reflects a locally grounded and cooperative approach. At the time of writing, the ICRC and ARCS have reached more than 6,000 individuals in more than 100 communities through the programme. The present study aims to explore how this comprehensive, community-based MHPSS intervention contributes to strengthening the resilience of individuals in the aftermath of the conflict and within a context of recurrent violence. A representative sample of 341 participants was selected from a total of 3,000 adult men and women who took part in the MHPSS group sessions during 2024 and 2025, and a fully quantitative approach was applied to assess participants’ levels of resilience, quality of life and perceived changes following their participation in the MHPSS programme. Outcomes from these three scales, along with analysis of correlations, helped address the question of the effectiveness of the intervention in building resilience. The results suggest that the programme’s community-based MHPSS approach may contribute to strengthening resilience and may represent an effective model that could be adapted to other contexts facing conflict and ongoing violence.