The word/concept of "resilience" is appearing with more and more frequency lately, the latest in an article by Thomas Barnett titled, "The New Rules: Putting Resilience at the Heart of Nation-Building". There was also an interesting short article on resilience in Foreign Policy Magazine recently, titled, "The Next Big Thing: Resilience".

I have noticed that the word resilience has come up a lot recently in the literature on fragile states and fragility, most importantly in the OECD Fragile States Working Group paper titled, "From Fragility to Resilience: Concepts and Dilemmas of Statebuilding in Fragile States" .

In this paper, I was especially struck by the inclusion of “citizen expectations” and how often I heard that high expectations are a major problem in post-conflict countries (matched with government’s inability to deliver services at the local level). In many societies, Liberia being one, resilience is a major factor in preventing further conflict. Here are some quotes from that report that highlight this approach:

"We presume the opposite of fragility not to be stability, though this has often been the goal of external actors, but rather resilience – or the ability to cope with changes in capacity, effectiveness, or legitimacy. Resilience, we argue, therefore derives from a combination of capacity and resources, effective institutions, and legitimacy, all of which are underpinned by political processes which mediate state-society relations and expectations. ". Page 2.

“The central contention of this paper is that fragility arises primarily from weaknesses in the dynamic political process through which citizens’ expectations of the state and state expectations of citizens are reconciled and brought into equilibrium with the state’s capacity to deliver services. Reaching equilibrium in this negotiation over the ‘social contract’ is the critical, if not the sole, determinant of resilience, and disequilibrium the determinant of fragility.” Page 3.

Barnett states that "The new rules for national security lie in making this notion of resilience central to the broader shifts in emphasis at both Defense and State. We must develop the ability to shift seamlessly from predation to protection, or from simply hunting down bad guys to making communities, societies, and regions more resilient in this age of globalization."

To some extent, this feels like a new term for the same old stuff, but I do think that terminology matters and I've always had a hard time with the term "stability" or even "sustainability". Resilience also connotes that a society is not resilience and we somehow need to build resilience. Again, the wrong approach. If we stop talking about what's not there and start noticing what is there (amazingly resilient, flexible and innovative societies that do a damn good job dealing with conflict, not to mention external intervention in their countries).