Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice: How Societies Recover after Collective Violence

Abstract

When referring to biological, psychological, social and institutional aspects of people's lives, the term resilience is best used to describe processes whereby individuals interact with their environments in ways that facilitate positive psychological, physical and social development. While earlier definitions emphasised individual traits and the invulnerability of individuals who coped well with adversity (Anthony and Cohler, 1987), more contextualised research has challenged the neo-liberal bias of these earlier studies (Sanders et al., 2015). When resilience was described as a trait, even if those traits were malleable, the implication was that individuals had the responsibility to develop the qualities necessary for optimal development, whether physical, psychological or social (like attachments). Resilience as a process, however, shifts the focus from individual responsibility for change to the interactions between individuals and their environments (Birgden, 2015; Ungar, 2015). The environment, whether referring to legal institutions, community services or the availability of intimate bonds and other antecedents of mental health (e.g., a sense of coherence [Antonovsky, 1996; Mittelmark et al., 2017]), combines to provide individuals with the internal and external resources necessary to cope with exceptional and uncommon stressors. For this reason, when resilience is understood as a process involving multiple systems, the responsibility for optimal functioning (whether psychological wellbeing or peace and security) under stress is shared across many different systems and at different scales (Ungar, 2018)