Decolonising Resilience: African Voices in Conversation

Resilience is perhaps the most important conceptual addition to international policy making in the last few decades. In placing relations, difference, and context at the heart of its approach, resilience understandings centre the methodologies and approaches of the arts and humanities. This is particularly the case in areas such as humanitarian relief, tackling climate change, and mitigating conflict and pandemics. Here, resilience functions as both an intervention strategy and a marker for the sustainability of efforts undertaken to support populations in alleged need. For this purpose, resilience is streamlined, operationalised, implemented, and measured. These procedures reflect the views and, in fact, requirements of those who are required to work on these projects from the Global North. Notwithstanding attempts to develop participatory methods and inclusive planning, resilience in international practice effectively reproduces historical colonial divides, impairing opportunities to think in more diverse and locally-grounded ways.

While resilience is considered necessary for policy interventions and humanitarian, development or peacebuilding practices, the all-purpose framing presents a narrow approach which silences alternative approaches to and understandings of the concept. Resilience is, in fact, a broad field that touches on economic, social and cultural relations underpinning views and traditions, sometimes challenging and even changing them. The more resilience is implemented by international organisations, the more these views vanish or are strategically ignored. Drawing on ideas of the travel of theories and concepts, this networking project seeks to bring to the fore the work done in negotiating, developing, and translating these concepts and practices by peoples, communities and individuals often considered to be subaltern, whose voices often silenced and marginalised.

An initial step is shifting the emphasis from policy planners and advocates to facilitate discussion and exchange in spaces beyond the traditional policy arenas in the Global North. This project is original not just in 'turning the tables' through starting with the understandings and practices of those often considered recipients of resilience training and capacity-building but also in starting this process through initiating dialogue and exchange of ideas and concerns between institutions, academics and community voices outside the Global North. We plan to initiate this via three interlinked workshops in different policy hubs in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The workshops - in Accra (Ghana), Kigali (Rwanda), and Juba (South Sudan) - will apply a particular lens of scrutiny on resilience to interrogate its meaning and collect and discuss understandings and approaches towards it. These lenses are understandings of indigeneity and local knowledge (Accra), autonomy and innovation (Kigali), and civil society and development (Juba). The networking project aims to enable the initiation of a scholarly community on resilience across Sub-Saharan Africa that gives an alternative forum for developing understandings and potentially questions the contemporary dominant rendering of resilience and thereby make visible alternative approaches to and understandings of resilience.

The project will significantly contribute to expanding and problematising the corpus of scholarly and policy-related knowledge on 'varieties of resilience' (Joseph) or 'complexity governance' (Chandler). It attempts to interrogate the intellectual space resilience may be able to provide for furthering debates about community approaches to change and innovation beyond a simplistic view of managing societal and individual development in the given liberal trajectories. Outcomes and outputs of the project will focus on making a scholarly contribution questioning hierarchical, post-colonial relations towards mutual intellectual explorations of the conceptual space resilience has opened.