51 C. Fernando and M. Ferrari (eds.), Handbook of Resilience in Children of War, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6375-7_5, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Introduction The impact of war on child and adolescent mental health is an issue that sits high on the global pub- lic health agenda, especially where it concerns young people living in low-income countries (Patel, Flisher, Hetrick, & McGorry, 2007) and conflict zones (Morris, van Ommeren, Belfer, Saxena, & Saraceno, 2007). One key debate in the literature on ‘conflict and child health’ focuses on the relative importance of exposure to differ- ent kinds of violence (Panter-Brick, Goodman, Tol, & Eggerman, 2011): are mental health out- comes primarily driven by war-related trauma, family-level violence and/or structural barriers taking the form of institutional, social and economic stressors? Of course, a protracted war exacerbates poverty, weakens social institutions, drives poor health and often increases social and economic inequalities. But such a macro-level view of the consequences of war does not neces- sarily help to understand the everyday experi- ences, emotional lives and social realities of children in conflict zones. It is essential for research to carefully assess the main drivers of child and adolescent mental health, in order to understand which cluster of childhood adversities has the greatest impact, to reach specific insights that have both local and global significance and to underscore which interven- tions might be most effective. Another key debate in the public health and child development literature centres on the con- ceptual understandings of ‘risk’ and ‘resilience’. Both risk and resilience matter to child well- being: it is necessary to assess both the vulnera- bilities and the strengths of children, families and communities living with protracted conflict. However, research on mental health in humanitar- ian settings is still dominated by a paradigm nar- rowly focused on individual responses to potentially traumatic events: a broader under- standing of resilience is only nascent (Panter- Brick, 2010). As argued by Layne, Waren, Watson, and Shalev (2007), the fields of developmental P. Ventevogel (*) Department of Research and Development, HealthNet TPO, Amsterdam, The Netherlands War Trauma Foundation, Diemen, The Netherlands e-mail: peter@peterventevogel.com M.J.D. Jordans Research and Development Department, HealthNet TPO, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Centre for Global Mental Health, London School of Hygiene and Hygiene, London, UK e-mail: mark.jordans@hntpo.org M. Eggerman MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: mark.eggerman@yale.edu B. van Mierlo Research and Development Department, HealthNet TPO, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: bibiane.vanmierlo@hntpo.org C. Panter-Brick Department of Anthropology & The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: catherine.panter-brick@yale.edu 5 Child Mental Health, Psychosocial Well-Being and Resilience in Afghanistan: A Review and Future Directions Peter Ventevogel, Mark J.D. Jordans, Mark Eggerman, Bibiane van Mierlo, and Catherine Panter-Brick