What makes communities resilient in times of complexity and change?

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Top Highlights

• group identity

• identity, ‘good life’, local coping strategies and support infrastructures—which, when mobilised, can turn community into ‘peoplehood’ in the face of adversity

• Central Eurasia, spanning from Belarus in the west, to Azerbaijan in the south and Tajikistan in the east

• ‘the VUCA-world’ (Burrows and Gnad Citation2018) and a ‘complex world’ (Kavalski Citation2007). These terms tease out key features of today’s environment such as volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of societal development (VUCA)

• The resulting approach focused on building institutions and structures facilitating resilience, understood as an ability of a system to bounce back after crises (Bourbeau Citation2018).

• This implied that a problem can be solved locally, yet through ‘outside-in’ international cooperation premised on the local appropriation of Western templates and resources

• This line of thinking argues that communities have capacities and coping strategies that are more attuned to resolving the problems on the ground, with external support as necessary—thus constituting an ‘inside-out’ perspective

• more sustainable orders and responsive governance on all levels

• identity shaped and driven by a sense of a ‘good life’; infrastructures of communal support; philosophy and traditions of neighbourliness; solidarity and convocation of the peoplehood (Korosteleva and Petrova Citation2021)—as a process that makes communities endure and transform in the face of adversity.

• hamsoya’ (sharing a shadow); ‘baghdad al wujad’ (unity of beings); ‘hamdardi’ and ‘ham-dili’ (compassionateness, kindness and forgiveness); and much more.

• people to strive together for a life worth living, and to stand tall as a community in the face of adversity.

• European Commission, resilience is defined as ‘the inherent strength of an entity—an individual, a household, a community or a larger structure—to better resist stress and shock, and the capacity of this entity to bounce back rapidly from the impact’

• community’ in a broad sense, as a group of individuals having a certain characteristic in common, including being bound, to a degree, by a specific locality, culture, behaviour, norms, institutions, and a ‘shared vision’

• building as premised on the two important elements—identity and a sense of a ‘good life’—that glue communities together to make them resilient in the face of adversity

• complex and unpredictable world, uncertainty plays a crucial role in identity formation: in particular, he notes that ‘identity is [only] manifested through the future’ where the latter is a ‘source of anxiety’. Identity ‘renders being incomplete’

• This is a powerful drive not only for ‘coping’ with stress and adversity today, but also for seeking change and a better tomorrow, which lies at the heart of communal resilience-building

• Entwurf

• Hence, the importance of ‘hamsoya’ (sharing a shadow with your neighbour) and ‘suzami’ (a symbol of unity) that come to represent the primacy of a collective Other in a Self’s becoming with the community of beings, informing a recurrent philosophy of resilience across Central Eurasia that makes a sense of community highly tangible.

• ‘You are everything, inside everything, and part of everything’ (Ibn Arabi cited in Nurulla-Khodzhaeva

• Central Eurasia provide more fertile ground for creative visions to emerge. Such visions are driven by an idea(l) that connects past philosophies of life with future aspirations, and creates a sense of becoming with