Resilience is an interdisciplinary concept that has been discussed in many different contexts. It is striking, however, that it has received very little attention within scholarship on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). Addressing this gap, CSRS was the first major – and comparative – study of resilience and victims-/survivors of CRSV. It focused on three diverse countries that have all experienced CRSV – Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), Colombia and Uganda.
Consistent with a significant shift in resilience scholarship away from studies emphasising individual personality and psychology traits towards more relational approaches that locate resilience in the interactions between individuals and their social ecologies (environments), the project aimed to explore how different resource environments and social-cultural contexts contribute to fostering – and hampering – resilience. In fact, it went a step further by developing its own novel social-ecological approach, using the concept of connectivity which it ‘borrowed’ from the discipline of ecology. In ecology, connectivity is largely about movement; it is what allows species to move between habitats. The project used the concept of connectivity to create a framework that captures the dynamic movements and shifts between individuals and their social ecologies (including families, communities, institutions and natural environments).
Another objective of the research was to address the neglect of resilience within the field of transitional justice. In this regard, the project had an ambitious transformative agenda, aimed at shifting the focus beyond just individuals to include the wider systems and social ecologies that crucially shape the legacies of violence and rights abuses. The project delivered a unique analysis of why and how the social ecologies – and connectivities – central to its understanding of resilience also matter for transitional justice. In so doing, it developed its own innovative social-ecological approach to transitional justice.
The project's importance to society is threefold. First, it has offered a different way of thinking about CRSV. In particular, its emphasis on connectivities and the significance of social ecologies suggests a way of broadening ‘survivor-centred’ approaches, to better acknowledge that victims-/survivors’ lives are deeply entangled with and affected by their environments. Social-ecological approaches to CRSV, thus, potentially benefit not only victims-/survivors themselves, but also key parts of their social ecologies. Second, the project’s social-ecological framing of transitional justice creates a basis for recognition of far-reaching harms that affect not only humans. but also the wider environments with which their lives and wellbeing are interconnected. In this way, it speaks to a broader literature - which transitional justice to date has largely overlooked - on posthumanism. Third, the project provides unique insights into some of the ways that victims-/survivors of CRSV in three different countries have dealt with their experiences. In this way, it contains important messages of hope that can potentially be of support to anyone who has suffered sexual violence or other traumas.
