Towards a Conceptual Model of Resilience As Dynamic, Communal and Political: Exploring the Links between Resilience and Resistance in Repressive Social Contexts.

Resilience research is a multidisciplinary, multidimensional field of scholarship entailing different theoretical models and assumptions at different levels of analysis. Nevertheless, Reich et al (2010) noted there has been two dominant themes central to the meaning of the resilience concept: (i) recovery, the ability to rebound from stress, a capacity to regain equilibrium and to return to a state of health; (ii) sustainability, the continuation of the recovery trajectory, and even growth and enhancement of function as a result of healthy reactions to stressful experience. Such a twin foci on recovery and sustainability lend themselves to addressing critiques raised by postcolonial authors regarding the need to move beyond “malaise and melancholia, with their connotations of submissiveness and inaction, as the inevitable outcome of traumatization” (Visser, 2015 in Andermahr, 2016). There has also been a growing consensus to broaden the concept of resilience as “positive adaptation” to focus on resilience as dynamic outcomes (Bonanno 2015; Kunzler et al, 2020), and to study resilience as a communal phenomenon, with researchers investigating post-traumatic growth and adaptive responses that occurred after adverse communal phenomena (Moscardino, 2007; Meili, 2020). It is no longer required for adversity to be defined as a singular event, nor for resilience to be examined only at the level of the individual. It is also important to understand that resilience “is a distinct process, independent of illness dimensions” (Reich, Zuatra and Hall, 2010). This opens up possibilities to explore “the creative and the political” rather than “the pathological and negative” that have been much deplored in trauma studies (Visser, 2015 in Andermahr, 2016). In this paper, I shall build on the above conceptual advancements to look at how resilience could be linked to resistance in a communal context in populations that have suffered from collective social trauma due to authoritarian repression.