Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice : How Societies Recover after Collective Violence

This interdisciplinary volume, which includes eight case study chapters, offers a novel conceptual and empirical analysis of resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice. It is the first volume of its kind to show how these three concepts can combine to inform individual and collective recovery from large-scale violence.

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the rule of law, delivering justice and aiding reconciliation – implicitly encompass a resilience element, transitional justice has not been explicitly theorised as a process for building resilience in communities and societies that have suffered large-scale violence and human rights violations. The chapters in this unique volume theoretically and empirically explore the concept of resilience in diverse societies that have experienced mass violence and human rights abuses. They analyse the extent to which transitional justice processes have – and can – contribute to resilience and how, in so doing, they can foster adaptive peacebuilding. This book is available as Open Access.