Resilience humanitarianism and peacebuilding

Abstract

How do we build the foundations for more resilient social, economic, and political systems and link individual with collective resilience to sustain change across generations? These are pressing questions in the fields of resilience humanitarianism and peacebuilding, fields that seek transformative, sustainable changes to achieve ambitious goals affecting research, policy and practice. This chapter provides three examples of systems-level thinking on resilience that have structured the architecture of the humanitarian and peacebuilding agenda. These examples offer proof-of-concept approaches to synergistically foster wealth, health, and peace, in ways that link: resilience and peacebuilding to household wealth and food security; resilience and social cohesion to individual health and stress regulation; and cultures of peace to caregiving and early child development. They emphasize a theory of change that strives to strengthen the social compact between state, civil society, and families in contexts of fragility, conflict, or forced displacement. Resilience is an everyday practice for crisis-affected communities, one rooted in the political economy of social action and structural transformation. Efforts to build systems-level resilience require careful work with respect to conceptual clarity, meaningful measurement, and grounded intervention.