Von der Duty of Care zur Culture of Care – Psychosoziale Personalbegleitung für Fachkräfte des Zivilen Friedensdienstes

To maintain psychosocial well-being, self care is often addressed. In the work context, however, the question of organisational care, the duty of care for employees, arises. In the field of international cooperation, mental health risks have been the main focus of attention, and measures of staff care have been little explored. This thesis explicitly addresses the question of how psychosocial support is provided to professionals in the international cooperation and civil conflict transformation and examines this using the example of the Civil Peace Service (CPS). The research explicitly focuses on the elements, services and measures of psychosocial staff care as well as the needs of the actors. Based on a literature study on the practice of staff care in international cooperation, a comprehensive empirical study is conducted. In order to include the diversity of the CPS, the author interviews CPS professionals and personnel managers and from the different CPS organisations as well as external coaches. She evaluates the 26 problem-centered expert interviews and 22 collected documents with the help of computer-assisted, content-structuring qualitative content analysis. The analysis brings to light a multitude of support elements and clarifies how psychosocial staff care is implemented and experienced in the CPS before, during and after the service. The need for support measures is reflected in the complexity of the concerns and needs of CPS professionals. In addition, the study identifies the actors' wishes for change and analyses areas of tension regarding the conceptualisation and design of staff care. The thesis compiles key findings on the further development of psychosocial staff care as lessons learned and discusses them in relation with different paradigms in the context of staff care and conflict transformation. The author concludes that the responsibility to care for the well-being of their staff is recognised by organisations and that staff care efforts in the CPS go beyond a purely legal duty of care. Through diverse staff care practices, actors are taking steps towards a more comprehensive culture of care. The paper shows how this culture of care is interwoven with a culture of peace. It shows that personal, collective and global well-being are interconnected and that psychosocial staff care contributes to peace work.