Social Resilience, Gendered Dynamics, and Local Peace in Protracted Conflicts

How can ‘resilient communities’ remain resilient in protracted conflicts and contribute to sustainable peace rather than to increased vulnerability to renewed conflict? How do local conflicts link to national conflicts and what are the implications for peacebuilding? What are the gender dimensions of social resilience? Is resilience always ‘a good thing’ or may it impede conflict resolution? This project pioneers an interdisciplinary research agenda into resilience building. The need for a greater analytical focus on the causes and consequences of social resilience is evident in the modest international record of peacebuilding and civilian protection. Scholarship increasingly invokes resilience terminology but lacks mature conceptual and empirical work. Building on the PI’s expertise in social resilience, communal conflict, and gender and peacebuilding, this project will establish an empirically-grounded research agenda on social resilience and sustainable peace. By providing a comparative analysis of resilience building and barriers to peace in Nigeria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Kenya, the project will create a new agenda for resilience research that rests on novel conceptual development and interdisciplinary approaches to resilience combined with the systematic study of social resilience and local peace produced by an integrated team of specialist researchers. The project will involve a fieldwork-based multi-method research design that combines advanced quantitative techniques for assessing the consequences of international peacebuilding with regard to local peace and women’s empowerment with context-sensitive qualitative analysis of the often unintended consequences of social resilience and hidden barriers to local peace and changing gender relations. The project will result in a new scholarly community with a shared intellectual focus on social resilience and sustainable peace in protracted conflicts.