Resilience as a ‘concept at work’ in the war in Ukraine: Exploring its international and domestic significance
Janine Natalya Clark discusses the key points from her new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article at - Resilience as a ‘concept at work’ in the war in Ukraine: Exploring its international and domestic significance
Introduction
I first became interested in resilience about nine years ago. I was in Bosnia-Herzegovina, doing some research on conflict-related sexual violence, and I was repeatedly told – particularly by people within the NGO sector – that women who were raped during the Bosnian war (men were rarely mentioned) are traumatised. In contrast to this prevalent trauma narrative, nobody was talking about resilience. Fast forward to February 2022. I was in the final year of a large, comparative research project exploring some of the ways that victims/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence demonstrate resilience – and the wider implications for transitional justice. As I continued to reflect on the empirical data and to weave together the different strands of the research, Russian forces invaded the sovereign state of Ukraine.
The war escalated quickly, like fire raging through a parched forest. Mariupol was one of the early casualties. I watched on television as this once beautiful port city was rapidly turned into a charred wasteland. How were people surviving in freezing conditions without heating and only limited food and water? What was motivating them to keep going? Did they have any choice? I started to think about resilience. Scholarship often mentions the etymology of the term; it has its origins in the Latin word resilire, meaning to bounce or to spring back. The idea of ‘bouncing back’, however, is very simplistic and it made no sense in this context. What could the citizens of Mariupol ‘bounce back’ to, given that their homes and city, and so many aspects of their everyday lives, had been destroyed?
I began to think more seriously about resilience in relation to the war in Ukraine as I became increasingly aware of the fact that reporting and commentary on the conflict frequently invoked the concept. Indeed, resilience seemed to be everywhere: an article in Time Magazine, published in October 2022, with the title ‘Ukraine’s resilience transcends the battlefield’; a commentary piece by the Royal United Services Institute in July 2022 called simply ‘Resilient Ukraine’; an article published by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2022 entitled ‘Ukrainians are showing the world the meaning of resilience’. I had the initial thought of writing an article on what we might learn about resilience from the war in Ukraine. As I started to explore this further, however, I became particularly curious about the fact that Western and Ukrainian leaders have consistently emphasised Ukrainian resilience.
Resilience as a ‘concept at work’
For anyone not familiar with existing scholarship on resilience, it is vast. Moreover, resilience is a concept that is discussed and studied within many different disciplines, from psychology, ecology and biology to law, IR and geography. While various definitions exist, the basic idea is that resilience is an adaptive response to significant shocks and stressors, such as financial crises, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. War and armed conflict are also important stressors that affect both individuals and the multiplicity of systems (families, communities, institutions, ecosystems) with which people’s daily lives are entangled. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there exists a substantial corpus of literature exploring resilience in conflict contexts. Like my own previous research on resilience and conflict-related sexual violence, however, this literature is primarily concerned with whether individuals in conflict and post-conflict environments are resilient – and with how they demonstrate resilience. Some recent scholarship on the war in Ukraine, for example, seeks to measure Ukrainians’ resilience (or the resilience of particular sections of the population).
My own article on the war in Ukraine does something different. Drawing on Piki Ish-Shalom’s idea of ‘concepts at work’, the article frames resilience as a ‘concept at work’ and analyses more than 40 policy statements and speeches – by Western leaders and President Volodymyr Zelensky – to unpack how resilience is at work in the war and what it is ‘doing’, both internationally and domestically within Ukraine. This split-level approach is consistent with the growing emphasis in resilience research – and particularly in the work of scholars such as Michel Ungar, Linda Theron and Ann Masten – on the importance of thinking multi-systemically about the concept.
What resilience is doing internationally
The war in Ukraine is now in its third year and the country’s leaders continue to call for more military aid; President Zelensky recently underscored during a video conference with NATO defence ministers that ‘Our skies must become safe again’. Yet, there are also important divisions among Western (and NATO) powers regarding Ukraine and ways of supporting the country. As just one example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has not ruled out the possibility of sending Western ground troops to Ukraine, emphasising that ‘nothing should be excluded’. Other NATO countries, however, including Poland and the Czech Republic, have strongly distanced themselves from Macron’s position.
Divisions such as these provide the crucial contextual backdrop for understanding what resilience discourse is doing in the war internationally. It is striking that when Western leaders refer to Ukrainian resilience (and, relatedly, courage and bravery), they frequently emphasise the feelings and emotions that it evokes, such as admiration and inspiration. The article argues that resilience is effectively being put to work emotionally and, in this way, it is also doing something important strategically, by shifting the focus from disagreements within the NATO alliance (and EU) and making prominent positive affective responses that both reinforce the necessity of continuing Western support and create a basis for forging solidarity.
What also stands out is that while many resilience scholars increasingly de-emphasise personal and psychological traits (to make the point that individuals are not resilient in isolation and need the support of larger systems), Western policy references to Ukrainian resilience very strongly accentuate these traits. In effect, what we are seeing in the war in Ukraine is the use of a heavily psychological discourse that has a wider macro systemic relevance and significance. More specifically, resilience is ‘at work’ in making clear and reinforcing what is at stake systemically in the war in Ukraine; supporting the country is ultimately about securing the stability and resilience of the liberal international order.
What resilience is doing domestically
As a former actor, President Zelensky is a very effective orator and his speeches are often peppered with references to resilience. He variously calls on Ukrainians to be resilient, stresses that they must be resilient and praises their resilience. The article maintains that resilience is ‘at work’ in Zelensky’s speeches in two key ways. First, it is a discourse that plays an important role in helping to boost and maintain public morale in Ukraine. This claim is based on available data, including public opinion polls, but it would be fascinating to explore this further once the war is over and to probe whether and to what extent Zelensky’s repeated references to resilience resonated with ordinary people in Ukraine. The article further maintains that by enhancing public morale, resilience is ‘at work’ in helping to keep Ukrainians united behind Zelensky and his war leadership – and indeed his speeches often stress the imperative of unity. In this way, he draws attention to the relational dynamics of resilience, as something that requires everyone working and pulling together for the greater good.
Second, Ukrainian resilience becomes a very empty notion if the county has no means to defend itself, and Zelensky often invokes resilience to strengthen Ukraine’s requests for further and increased military support. In short, he uses the trope of resilience to underline that Ukraine is deserving of further support but also, relatedly, to accentuate his country’s international significance. Additionally, we see resilience ‘at work’ in his speeches as a unifying discourse. He needs his allies to be united as much as possible, not divided among themselves, and he frequently emphasises that Ukraine’s resilience and the qualities that he associates with it have brought countries together.
Conclusion
The article makes a novel contribution to existing scholarship on resilience in conflict settings. There is only limited research on what resilience ‘does’, as opposed to what it looks like or how we measure it. Furthermore, recurring references to Ukrainian resilience as something that already exists, rather than as something that needs to be politically fostered from the top down, problematise in a novel way arguments that resilience is a form of neoliberal governmentality. Ultimately, what the article demonstrates – thereby challenging siloed approaches to resilience – is that in the context of the war in Ukraine, different resiliences are effectively working together at different levels, which, in turn, offers a novel way of thinking multi-systemically about resilience and about resilience and complexity.
Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000305
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Photo by Jade Koroliuk licenced under Unsplash
