Understanding Societal Resilience

Dear Colleagues,

Resilience has become an integral part of today’s public discourse. In particular, discussions on the resilience of individuals in the face of great or constant stress, resilience of democratic societies despite populist and anti-democratic crises, and the resilience of people and societies in the face of catastrophes increasingly perceived as existential, caused by climate change and the Anthropocene, have so far mostly been conducted separately. While there is growing political and public interest in the topic with regard to different societal fields, the concept of resilience is being applied in a variety of disciplinary contexts. Thus, research into the resilience of human individuals and communities has become increasingly differentiated in recent years (Wink 2016; Karidi et al. 2018; Ungar 2021). In particular, the following contextual constellations will be discussed in this Special Issue: (1) interventionist and descriptive-empirical approaches to resiliencies, (2) individual, situational and social understandings of resiliencies, and (3) analytical research interests. This proliferation of perspectives requires inter-/transdisciplinary approaches to further grasp and develop the concept of societal resilience.

Against this background, the contributions to this Special Issue focus on improving our understanding of resilience as a heuristic, as an observational perspective for the analysis of bio-cultural, socio-ecological and socio-historical processes, thereby making it possible to move away from individualistic, essentialist and normative shortcuts that often can be identified in resilience research. The focus will be on a non-teleological and non-linear understanding of resilience processes, which allow us to understand resilience as a structurally ambivalent dialectic of continuity and discontinuity of perseverance and change. Such an understanding of resilience enables a sensitive look at multi-level dynamics of societal constellations and their sometimes opposing or paradoxical (structural and temporal) effects. Therefore, the focus cannot be on the question of whether resilience per se and in principle is a helpful concept, but rather in which contexts which concepts of resilience can be made analytically fruitful and how concepts used in different disciplines can be effectively integrated to come to a better understanding of resiliencies.

References

• Wink, R. (Ed.) (2016). Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven der Resilienzforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer.
• Karidi, Maria et al. (Eds.) (2018). Resilienz. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven zu Wandel und Transformation. Wiesbaden: Springer.
• Ungar, M. (Ed.) (2021): Multisystemic Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation in Contexts of Change. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press.

Prof. Dr. Martin Endress
Prof. Dr. Alexandra Busch
Guest Editors

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• societal resilience
• communities
• socio-historical processes
• individuals
• multi-level dynamics