There exists a vast body of scholarship, written from multiple disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives, exploring the complexities of resilience. It is striking, however, that resilience has received only limited attention in the context of communities and societies that have experienced conflict, violence and large-scale human rights abuses. It has similarly attracted little attention within the field of transitional justice. The book’s introduction sets out how and why this unique volume, which includes eight case studies, seeks to address these gaps. It proceeds to outline and discuss the three central strands that run through the book and weave the different chapters together, namely resilience (which the book approaches as a systemic and social ecological concept), transitional justice and de Coning’s adaptive peacebuilding. What this edited volume ultimately seeks to demonstrate is that thinking about resilience as a multi-systemic concept opens up a space for developing new ways of theorizing and operationalizing transitional justice that are more responsive to the wider social ecologies that link individuals and communities to their environments – and to the broader systems within which transitional justice work takes place. Responsiveness to these social ecologies and systems, in turn, is a crucial part of adaptive peacebuilding.

The use of rape was common during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Six days after the war ended, the new government publicly declared that any woman raped in the war was a birangona or ‘war heroine’. There exists a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms, ensuring that the raped woman endures as an iconic figure. However, women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence are often explained through the limited lenses of silence, voice, shame, honour, gender, patriarchy, stigma, trauma and ostracisation, which help to create the figure of the horrific raped woman – meaning that birangonas are often assumed to have a horrific life trajectory. This can undermine the very resilience that characterises many of the women who were raped. In contrast, this chapter focuses on generative resilience, as offering a different narrative of sexual violence that emphasises women’s abilities to continue to live with and pass on the experiences of sexual violence in ways that are uniquely relational. It is this contextualised and social ecological understanding of resilience that needs to inform adaptive peacebuilding, in order to foster a nuanced understanding of the effects of rape as a weapon of war.

This chapter focuses on the village of Ahmići in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the Bosnian war, a massacre in the village resulted in the deaths of more than 100 Bosniak men, women and children. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in July 2019, the chapter argues that while many interviewees demonstrated resilience simply through everyday acts of getting on with and rebuilding their lives, Ahmići cannot be accurately described as a resilient community – the sum of its parts – because it has not dealt with what happened in 1993 as a community. A crucial reason for this is the existence of multiple systemic factors – including the politicisation of the Bosnian war, the absence of a cross-ethnic narrative and divided school systems – that have not allowed the community to come together as one and rebuild social connections. It demonstrates that transitional justice work – particularly the trials that took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – further contributed to entrenching inter-ethnic divides. The chapter accordingly calls for a social ecological reconceptualisation and reframing of transitional justice, operationally linking this to adaptive peacebuilding.

In the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea and the civil wars that preceded and succeeded it, victims have rebuilt their lives, demonstrating a desire and capacity to survive in the face of extreme hardship. This chapter explores resilience in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Using a social ecological lens, it examines how various systems – and in particular political, legal and economic systems – interact to provide resources that enable and foster resilience among victim populations. It also demonstrates, however, that these systems, individually and in interaction with each other, often remove resources or even undermine resilience. Within this systemic structure, the chapter analyses how transitional justice work in Cambodia has affected resilience. Focused specifically on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, it argues that while the tribunal has the potential to contribute to resilience (and does for some victims), its design and procedures constrain it in this regard, even inadvertently reinforcing broader marginalising systemic dynamics. The key point is that national actors in Cambodia recognise that they can gain significant advantages through corrupt practices and autocratic power, and thus they have used transitional justice strategically to undermine peacebuilding.

This chapter analyses different aspects of resilience, or the lack thereof, within the experiences of those affected by five decades of armed conflict in Colombia. Although resilience has long been understood in a person-centred way, this chapter argues that such personal aspects of resilience cannot be understood in isolation from broader socio-economic aspects such as work, social relations and communities’ wider developmental and infrastructural conditions. The chapter discusses whether and how transitional justice has addressed these issues in Colombia. Looking particularly at reparations, it demonstrates that transitional justice has predominantly taken a person-centric approach oriented towards monetary compensation, while disregarding the wider social, built and natural environment. It also explores how the needs of those affected by conflict can change over time and across conflict experiences and geographical spaces. This necessarily requires an ongoing analysis of locally-specific needs and conditions, in line with the core elements of adaptive peacebuilding. The chapter concludes with reflections on how transitional justice, including the restorative justice sentences which will be applied by Colombia’s most recent transitional justice mechanism – the Special Jurisdiction for Peace – could help to promote the resilience that conflict-affected communities need to move forward.

In the aftermath of the more than twenty-year armed conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, northern Uganda has become a transitional justice laboratory. In response to widespread human rights violations perpetrated by both the rebels and government soldiers, various peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms have been put into place. However, many of them are top-down and externally-driven, inaccessible to rural communities and/or irresponsive to diverse experiences and post-conflict needs. In this vacuum of post-conflict assistance, different alternative avenues have emerged at the micro level that ultimately enable war-affected communities to engage with their subjective experiences on their own terms. This chapter specifically focuses on the role of survivors’ support groups. It shows how different types of survivors’ groups, in a creative and participatory manner, enable survivors’ agency and craft spaces for healing, justice making and peace-building, shaped by survivors’ own experiences and needs. Support groups thereby aid survivors in developing adaptive capacities to positively respond to shocks and stressors resulting from mass violence. In this way, these groups also contribute to fostering individual and community resilience.