Abstract Book of the 8th World Conference on Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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Resilience as Process: Rethinking Adaptation and Agency after a Catastrophe The case of the inhabitants’ resilience after Beirut Port explosion (4th August 2020)
Elif Çoban
ABSTRACT:
Resilience has become a central concept in understanding how individuals, communities, and systems respond to adversity. It is a key concept in disaster studies, with a particular focus on how individuals and communities adapt to extreme circumstances. While often invoked in policy and popular discourse as an innate capacity to ‘‘bounce back’’ from disruption, this paper argues for a more nuanced and critical approach. Resilience is better understood as a dynamic, context-dependent process shaped by historical, structural, and relational factors. This presentation explores resilience not as a static trait but as a social practice that involves negotiation, adaptation, and at times resistance. It examines how resilience can both reinforce and challenge existing inequalities, particularly along lines of gender and class. By emphasizing individual responsibility and adaptability within a framework that promotes limited government intervention and encourages self-governance such as after Beirut Port explosion (4th of August 2020), it is argued that resilience is a term embedded in neoliberal governance, whereby responsibility for recovery is increasingly devolved to individuals and communities amid structural neglect.This paper invites a rethinking of resilience beyond its traditional uses, toward a more grounded, political, and human-centered understanding of survival and transformation in times of crisis. In the context of post-disaster recovery following the Beirut Port explosion of 2020, drawing from interdisciplinary literature, it examines how individuals and families navigate trauma and uncertainty through adaptive strategies, knowing that some generations have already experienced many disasters due to the civil war (1975-1990). Emphasizing resilience as both a lived experience and a political discourse, this approach situates it within the everyday realities of those affected by the explosion, and their strategies of survival, resistance, and reorganization. Additionally, it highlights the role of NGOs and grassroots initiatives, often the first to respond in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, in sustaining community resilience. These actors provide crucial material aid and emotional support, while also fostering collective action and local solidarity in the absence of effective state intervention. This critically engages with the shift from individual to collective and community-based understandings of resilience, highlighting the role of social networks, cultural practices, and gender dynamics in shaping coping mechanisms. This conceptual framing lays the groundwork for further empirical analysis.
Keywords: resilience, disaster studies, the Beirut Port explosion, agency, gender