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A Look At Resilience Through The Lens Of
War |
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Author:
Madeline M. Roberts
MPH, PhD Aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Red Cross have deployed medical teams and psychologists to Ukraine to treat the wounded and provide care for those in distress and who have experienced trauma. MSF established a medical train in March 2022, which is used to treat, monitor, and transport patients and their family members from inundated hospitals to hospitals with capacity in other areas of the country. The war in Ukraine is not over, and there are currently conflicts in several other areas of the world as well. What does it look like to endure and continue life in these circumstances, and what happens when prolonged conflict does finally end? Resilience is defined in a variety of ways across the literature and includes individual, family, and cultural levels. Many scholars support the idea that the predictors for resilience vary over time and across contexts. A group of researchers who have worked with Syrian refugees described it this way, “To study resilience is to identify ways in which individuals and communities withstand adversity through individual and collective strengths, resources, and capabilities.” Some of the measures the group used to study resilience in Syrian refugees evaluated household wealth, lifetime trauma, and psychosocial stress, and they found that resilience was inversely associated with mental health symptoms. Resilience research at the individual level includes a study with Ukrainian refugees that clustered qualitative data and found that relationships (family, friends, aid volunteers) and “interior life” (predominately prayer, also memories) were among the greatest sources of support and resilience for those affected by the war. A systematic review on children living in areas of armed conflict concluded that interventions to build resilience among this demographic must be highly contextual. Generally, socio-ecological context is highly important and should be emphasized in interventions to promote resilience. Parental support, quality of home environment and family life were often protective factors for children. At the family level, practices for resilience among refugee families included spending time together, maintaining routines and rituals, open communication, clear allocation of responsibilities, and flexibility to develop alternative plans. At the cultural or societal level, some studies have differentiated resilience in post-war rural areas from that in urban areas. Lack of capital and economic resources, as well as dependence on a single economic sector can handicap resilience in rural areas. Resilience planning for rural communities necessitates a multi-factorial approach aimed at improving overall livelihood—food security and nutrition, job creation for youth, as well as social and economic considerations.
Though not written for the context of war, in her
seminal work on resilience in children,
developmental psychologist Ann Masten emphasized the “ordinariness of
resilience.” That the power to recover is not exclusively for the special
or the strong. Rather, it is in the relatively quotidian stuff of life,
normative capabilities hardwired in the minds of children, in their
families and communities. She called this ordinary magic.
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