When the objective is to construct a society that embraces peace, the concept of resilience refers to the capacity that a society has to endure, overcome, and emerge even stronger from situations of violent conflict. In order for this to occur, it is important to identify the capacities that a community has to confront the challenges that violent conflict can pose. In many cases, resilience is a concept that has been generalized and carelessly used to describe specific characteristics and concrete relationships of a reaction, a causality, or a state of being.
The theoretic debate and the evolution of the concept itself results in the understanding of resilience as the ability of an object to absorb the impact or the tension and return to its original condition. That is, resilience is often discussed in terms of a process of absorption. For example, a person can withstand great emotional strain and simply absorb it and store it within his or her own emotional capacity without doing much about it. However, it is a human trait to seek a way to reduce or deal with this emotional strain. This then leads to the second component of resilience in the theoretical debate: adaptation. Adaptation refers to the ability of an object to absorb the tension, strain, or pain caused by an external event and its capacity to adapt to the effects of the external variable. It is important to note that there cannot be resilience if the element of an external event is not present. The external event provides the tension or the shock that activates the abilities previously mentioned. In the socio-environmental context, resilience is understood as the capacity that an ecosystem has of receiving an impact while conserving the same function, structure, and identity. Resilience in this context manifests itself with reference to the magnitude of the perturbations that can be assimilated before the changes its structure and its functions. This is what then leads to the restoration of the system for its own preservation and its ability to survive and evolve in a sustainable manner. In this sense, environments and natural habitats can be said to be resilient. Since there must be an element of an external shock, resilience is thus understood as resilience towards something or in relationship an external factor. Therefore, it is incorrect to assume an object as naturally resilient. Resilience is generated, developed, and matured at the moment in which it is exposed to the external element. This then results in a process of resilience towards something. Under western perception, resilience is often seen as an individual rather than a collective trait. Here is where the concept encounters a conceptual gap in its implementation in peacebuilding processes. There is growing interest on the specific sources of fragility and resilience in the context of fragile states and those affected by conflict. The main objective here is to identify the capacities of communities to confront conflict, anticipate risks, resolve problems in a collaborative and non-violent form, respond creatively to conflict and crisis, and impulse a social change that transforms the structural foundations of the conflict in order to foster peace and its development. Peace, in addition to being an objective automatically defined by the end of an armed conflict, is a long-term process that is geared towards the constant strengthening of the social capacities to transform conflict through non-violent methods. In this sense, conflict transformation or peacebuilding is understood as a process of transformation rather than absorption or adaptation. Therefore, conflict is inherent in any social and political system. This is true due to the diversity in human ideas, interests, and agendas. In that sense, conflict can be a positive trait for social change as long as conveys itself in non-violent forms. The way in which conflict is understood is essential in order to define the type of action needed for social change. In other words, there will always be tensions or "conflictability" within a community. This differs with conflict in the sense that the latter produces polarization due to the lack of trust, lack of legitimacy towards state institutions, and the presence of violence. Peace, understood as the situation that arises once and armed confrontation has ended, is an aspiration that is overcome due to the persistence of the "conflictability" and the various incomplete and limited reforms that are left from the period post-conflict. These are usually materialized through poverty, inequality, corruption, and violence. Hence, peacebuilding, as a framework that is used as a reference for social change, mainly consists of a series of actions that are fundamental for the transformation of conflicts and that help guide social forces towards common objectives centred around overcoming communal obstacles so that, in this way, a peaceful coexistence can be achieved. This is what the concept of resilience in the context of conflict essentially means. In conclusion, the concept of resilience within peacebuilding refers to the collective capacities of a society to transform conflict into a series of actions that enable peaceful coexistence albeit ongoing disagreement in ideas, interests, and agendas. The analytical strategy can be summarized into three main components. The first refers to the actions as a response of the social groups towards armed conflict. The second, the substance of the strategy, is the articulation of the actions in the function of their contribution to the generation of peace and social capital within the social cohesion of a community. Finally, the identification of the capacities that allow this to take place is at the forefront of resilience. This final component is what allows the strategy to be replicated in other scenarios. Of course, local context must always be taken into account in the construction of a peacebuilding strategy. There have been significant challenges within academia in the understanding of the concept of resilience as a consequence of armed conflict and its potential in becoming the center-piece for a peacebuilding project. This reflection sought to bring a wider understanding of the concept under examination.
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David Romero Archives
August 2019
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