Chapter 1 raises the question of whether there was a decisive break in the nature of the city between Classical Antiquity and the post-Roman world of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It is suggested that treating ‘the ancient city’ as typologically different from cities before or after obscures both the real degree of continuity and the perceptions of contemporaries of continuity. The chapter explores the historiography of the idea of the ancient city as a distinct type that goes back to Fustel de Coulanges, and has been identified by different schools of thought as religious, economic, political, and physical. Rather than thinking of ‘decline and fall’, or even ‘transformation’, a new approach is offered through resilience theory, that sees a continuous process of drawing on memories of the past and, through them, adaptation.

Returning to the recurrent theme of resilience, it is suggested that the ecological model of adaptive cycles helps to understand the responses of the post-antique world to crisis. Rather than rejecting the old model of civilisation based on cities, memories of the past are constantly used both as providing material for new adaptations, and as a way of associating contemporary realities with those of the classical world. The writings of the authors discussed in this book as seen as part of this process, of transmitting and adapting memories.

In this chapter, I describe my path from adolescent musing about the dialectical processes in historical materialism to a theoretical framework for understanding human development. I moved from a search for single factors in the individual or the context to an appreciation of the multiple influences that come into play during the course of time. I found a home in the burgeoning field of developmental psychopathology that integrated developmental approaches and the study of mental illness to reveal the complexity of transactional influences from the child and the social environment that produce health or illness. I found that despite an emphasis on fostering resilience in children, environmental risk factors seem to undermine child competence at every age. The burden of multiple risk factors in the family, peer group, schools, and neighborhoods overcome child competencies. Contemporary systems approaches have proven that dialectical processes were the answer all along.

This chapter chronicles the professional trajectory of Dante Cicchetti from his undergraduate years as a psychology major at the University of Pittsburgh through obtaining his PhD in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota. It describes his longitudinal research on the organization of development in infants and children with Down Syndrome. Subsequently, while an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard, his first academic job, he began groundbreaking longitudinal research on the etiology, intergenerational transmission, and developmental sequelae of child maltreatment. He also initiated theoretical work on the discipline of developmental psychopathology. At the Mt. Hope Family Center in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester, genetic, epigenetic, and biological research were implemented and linked to psychosocial and resilient functioning of child maltreatment and the offspring of depressed mothers. Evidence-based preventive interventions were conducted and shown to improve the functioning of maltreated youngsters and young offspring of depressed caregivers.

Learning is not just a process of acquiring knowledge; it’s a fundamental aspect of human development with profound implications for brain health, mental wellbeing, and societal progress. Continuous learning fosters resilience, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving abilities, vital for managing stress and promoting emotional wellbeing. It empowers individuals to develop self-confidence, competence, and mastery over challenges, enhancing self-esteem and overall mental health. Moreover, learning fuels critical thinking, creativity, and innovation, driving societal advancement and cultural evolution. Brain plasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt and change throughout life, underpins learning and cognitive development. Structural and functional changes in the brain occur in response to learning experiences, highlighting the importance of cognitive stimulation in maintaining brain health and cognitive function. Lifelong learning builds cognitive reserve, a reservoir of cognitive capacity that buffers against age-related cognitive decline and neurological disorders. Engaging in diverse, intellectually stimulating activities enhances cognitive reserve, underscoring the lifelong value of education and mental stimulation in preserving brain health and cognitive function.

The Conclusion argues that, taken together, the AKP’s combined authoritarian securitisation state is predicated on five authoritarian securitisation logics:1) repressive protection of the state; 2) cruel retributive punishment; 3) centralised and mass lateral control; 4) self-regulation through informalised rule of law; and 5) biosecuritisation as a doubled form of civic death. I then examine present-day global empirics concerning the global system of securitisation to argue that the differences between democratic and authoritarian governance are increasingly more of degree than kind. Asking the question of what next, I look briefly at signs of democratic optimism visible in Turkish citizen’s capacity for resilience and innovative resistance.

With a specific focus on violence and abuse, this chapter explores some the challenges that LGBTIQ people often experience, but also the strengths that LGBTIQ people display. The chapter reviews research on intimate partner violence experienced by LGBTIQ people (including identity-related abuse) and the violence perpetrated against animals in these contexts. Situating challenges alongside strengths is an important counter to the often negative messages and stereotypes that circulate about LGBTIQ people, as it encourages a focus on identifying sites of resistance and opportunities for change. The chapter therefore also explores the resiliencies that LGBTIQ people display in the face of adversity, including through relationships with animal companions.

In this chapter, I first document the great agrarian famine of 1879–80, followed by a detailed analysis of peasants’ livelihood circumstances in the countryside of Diyarbekir, Erzurum and Van, and the politics of food and water scarcity as it impacted agricultural production and the agrarian economy. Next, I turn to the appearance of new environmental disasters in the 1880s and 1890s. These crises exacerbated conflict between local powerbrokers and peasants, and radically transformed settlement patterns within Ottoman Kurdistan. The second major section of the chapter depicts how climatic factors and the periodicity of environmental change impacted pastoralists and it includes a discussion of how climatic fluctuations affect the physiology of herd animals. I conclude this section by examining pastoralist survival strategies, and how these contributed to the growth of intercommunal tension in Kurdistan in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.

Moving prevention for college students out of the mental health clinic and into the classroom changes the campus environment. A curricular approach to enhancing student resilience is described through an exemplar of a one-credit general education course focused on adaptive responses to stress, Changing Minds, Changing Lives (CMCL). The experiential, strength-based curriculum is designed to meet basic psychological needs, buffer predictable stress, and boost adaptive resilience. Based on a social–ecological model of resilience, the CMCL program functions as a campus opportunity structure teaching self-regulation skills, facilitating greater connectedness, and strengthening resilience capacities. The model operationalizes the resilience response as a set of concrete actions that facilitate adaptive reorientation and reorganization in the face of challenge, mobilize relevant assets and resources, and leverage social connections to navigate adversity. Evidence-based applications of strength-based pedagogy, mindfulness practices, expressive writing, and inclusive group process in the course structure are described, and empirical validation of model efficacy is reviewed.

This chapter discusses the implications of considering the health system as part of the national social infrastructure, using the example of the demand surge experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic for the UK’s rationed, largely free at the point of need National Health Service (NHS). It explores the impact of the past prioritization of the cost efficiency of the service rather than long-term need. An infrastructure perspective incorporating resilience and peak-demand considerations sheds new light on the performance of the health service and underlines the role of healthcare systems in human capital investment and economy-wide productivity.