Professor Janine Natalya Clark’s newest book constitutes the first major and comparative study of resilience focused on victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), and it examines the wider significance of its conceptual and empirical analyses for the field of transitional justice. Directly challenging arguments that associate resilience with neoliberal policy agendas, this interdisciplinary research demonstrates that exploring the concept in the context of CRSV offers important new insights into ways of supporting victims-/survivors and their wider social ecologies (environments). It draws on empirical data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda. The book is one of the core outputs of a five-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant, which Clark was awarded in 2017 (grant number 724518).
Abstract
Resilience is about much more than individuals ‘bouncing back’ from adversity. It is about the relationships and interactions between individuals and what they have around them – including family, community, non-governmental organisations and the natural environment. This book develops its own novel conceptual framework, based on the idea of connectivity which it ‘borrows’ from the field of ecology. It applies this framework, in turn, to analyse the empirical data, and it tells a set of stories about resilience through the contextual, dynamic and storied connectivities between individuals and their social ecologies. Ultimately, it utilises the three elements of the framework – namely, broken and ruptured connectivities, supportive and sustaining connectivities and new connectivities – to argue the case for developing the field of transitional justice in new social-ecological directions and to explore what this might entail, conceptually and practically.
