4 - Resilience, What's in a name?: A conceptual proposal and its application to Aceh in the post-tsunami period

This concept paper is to outline a new research agenda assessing how the concept of resilience, as it has been employed within Peace and Conflict Studies’ literature, might be further developed to better account for instances of gradual, latent, and unobservable violence in post-conflict/disaster spaces. Specifically, it suggests that the typical focus of researchers on one system (for example, communities, everyday people, or local elites) and a specific event (typically conceived of as the instance in which a system changes), fails to adequately account for more subtle and latent stressors that tend contribute to this change and whose impacts are unequally distributed across time and space but which, in many instances, are sharper and more significant amongst impoverished and marginalised communities. Here, the language of ‘shock’ and ‘disaster’ enables researchers and practitioners to focus on the most immediate and observable causes and effects of violence, overlooking the effects of systemic power inequalities and temporal complexities which tend to see the impacts of shocks amplified and carried over from one event to the next. To overcome these issues while also deepening the utility of resilience to peace research, we propose interrogating the term through the notion of ‘slow violence’ to develop a cyclical framework which provides increased space for researchers to contextualise their research, articulate the dimensions which they have concerned themselves with, and illustrate those areas that, for better or for worse, remain absent or understated within their analysis.


Co-Author 1
Aidan Gnoth, University of Marburg