Resilience
Resilience is the ability to cope with challenging situations such as emergencies, and then to recover from them and/or to transform them.
Origin
The term ‘resilience’ (from Latin resilire – to rebound, recoil) was adopted from its use in materials science, where it describes the property of a material to react elastically to compressive forces and return to its original shape without being damaged.
Resilience: Socio-political context and personal resources
The advantages of using this term lie in the emphasis on the capacities and resources we are endowed with as humans.
Representatives of neoliberalism increasingly try to use the idea of resilience to shift aspects of responsibility away from society and into the realm of the individual. However, the ability of anyone to develop personal resources and then apply them is actually dependent on socio-political factors which can increase vulnerability, taking away the possibility of coping with challenges by means of our own efforts. These factors include poverty, displacement and migration, and structural discrimination.
This means, for example, that a white person with a secure job will tend to have better conditions for developing their resilience than a person of colour with an insecure residence status. So medica mondiale emphasises the interconnection between the socio-political context and personal resources.
Updated: 01/2024
