Understanding the three levels of resilience: Implications for countering extremism

Abstract

The huge growth in expenditure on counter‐extremism and counter‐terrorism policy post 9/11 (Dawson & Guinnessy, 2002; Lum, Kennedy, & Sherley, 2006; Silke, 2004) has seen buzzwords such as “resilience” integrated without clear framing or the underpinning of empirical evidence. The issue addressed by the current study is twofold: the framing of resilience within policy is not such that it clearly relates to extremism and, the subsequent lack of understanding that exists on the relationships between the 3 levels of resilience under this framing. The National Resilience Scale (Kimhi, Goroshit, & Eshel, 2013) is applied alongside measures of community and individual resilience to test the hypothesis that all three levels would positively correlate with one another. The hypothesis was supported in study 1, but not study 2, with community resilience negatively correlating with both individual and national resilience. The implications of this conceptual framework are discussed, primarily the impact on contemporary policy, specifically around extremism and terrorism.

Theory and practice of building community resilience to extreme events

“…Resilience operates at different levels, including the micro, meso and macro. However, Ryan et al (2018) note "there is no empirical evidence to suggest that individual resilience alone predicts community resilience and in turn national resilience". Community resilience, then, cannot simply refer to a collection of resilient individuals, but instead encompasses a more complex set of relations cross-cutting these different levels.…”

Is Resilience a Good Concept in Terrorism Research? A Conceptual Adequacy Analysis of Terrorism Resilience

“…Only recently has research begun to examine the associations between different levels of resilience. 79,80,81 This research conclude that the different levels of resilience are all positively correlated with each other, but that their low common variance also emphasized their distinctiveness. As such, there is reason to question whether all these attributes and scales of terrorism resilience belong together in the same scientific concepts, especially if the aim of the research is to measure resilience or to describe how to become resilient.…”

“…The links and the associations between the levels of resilience is not supported by empirical evidence. 82,83 Despite of the plurality and inconsistency of the resilience concept in the academic literature, the idea of resilience makes sense because counterterrorism nowadays has become a multiscale responsibility. Consequently, on an overall level, all these different interpretations of terrorism resilience are meaningful because together they constitute a coherent idea of a resilient society.…”

Migration and Resilience in Urban Canada: Why Social Resilience, Why Now?

“…Institutions are considered in more detail in the recent literature promoting community resilience as a means of discouraging radicalization in newcomer communities (Ellis & Abdi, 2017 ; Ryan et al, 2018 ). In this literature, resilience is often conceptualized concretely as a group’s success in counteracting community-based violence and radical recruitment.…”