South Sudan is the newest country in the world. Yet, almost a decade and a half after acquiring sovereign state status in July 2011, it appears to enjoy a second-rate form of independence. Not under direct colonial control and no longer part of the larger (currently war-torn) Sudanese state, South Sudan has a contemporary form of government: resilience governance. Resilience often seems like a good idea, but when international agencies and institutions believe resilience is low, communities risk being constrained by a policy of subordination and international dependence. Indeed, lack of resilience means that you need external guardianship. This type of external “resilience support” should not be understood as a simple set of temporary measures. There is a paradox when it comes to resilience: the consequence of developing resilience policies is that the adaptive capacities of communities are weakened while the presence of international agencies continues to expand.
This new form of international institutional governance of resilience is managed by resilience “experts” who work across a wide range of international NGOs, fueled by funds from donors and national governments. In post-independence South Sudan, international agencies quickly moved away from purely humanitarian aid to much more political and economic long-term resilience programs. This resulted in the UK funded project Building resilience through asset creation and improvement (2013-2015 and 2015-2023) and Humanitarian assistance and resilience in South Sudan (2015-2021). In addition to a multitude of multi-donor programs, such as the Partnership for Resilience and Recovery and the Trust Fund for Reconciliation, Stabilization and Resilienceas well as the creation of the NGO-led group Resilience Exchange Network.
While colonialism operated in a clear and direct way, denying civil and democratic rights, resilience functions as a strange halfway house where (officially) people, communities and government agencies are treated as if they were equals. their Western advisors and capacity builders. – but in practice it is clear that they are considered incapable of participating on the basis of equality.
Resilience narratives about economic sustainability, rights, civil society, and policing all assume that South Sudanese are not ready to access liberal modes of development and democracy. For example, instead of doing development work, international agencies are likely to argue that development will fail if communities are not already “resilient”, or that resilience is a “conceptual bridge between adaptation and development “. Instead of simply providing humanitarian aid or temporary law enforcement or social assistance, humanitarian agencies argue that these policies or resources will be of no use without the resilience of communities. Talk to political NGOs that work with political parties and it’s the same thing, apparently people are not really ready for democracy; society does not have an “inclusive contract”, so civil society must become resilient and parties must focus on technical concerns rather than issues that could divide and risk a return to violence.
There is a clear distinction between the beneficiaries of the promotion of resilience in the countries of the South, who are placed in the condition of being objects of resilience policies, and the imaginary of resilience of successful Western subjects, who They adapt, recover and are always open to possibilities of adaptation. In the Global South, resilience building functions differently to deny a sense of individuality rather than to celebrate the neoliberal entrepreneurial self.
Seen as not being independent and self-determined subjects, communities are therefore seen as lacking the basis to assert themselves, to express themselves legitimately and to obtain political consent. This distinction raises obvious similarities with the era of colonialism and with racial hierarchies of power and influence. As Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, the divide between colonized and colonizers was constructed precisely along these lines. In this context, the University of Westminster and Coventry University have a joint academic networking project (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council) designed to explore what the “decolonization of resilience” by creating a network of academics from the South. . The project initially involves an exchange of academics from the University of Ghana, the University of Kigali and the University of Juba. We met for a second workshop, in Juba, South Sudan, at the end of November this year.
One of the first things to emerge from our work is that resilience seems to be a confusing category. Within the framework of traditional international political discourses, resilience is difficult to define. While discussions of humanitarianism and development assume recipient independence, resilience undermines or operates outside of liberal conceptions of equality and universalist conceptions of capabilities and capabilities.
Resilience is also difficult to capture in the more specialized policy and academic literature. In some literature, resilience is used in a more traditional sense, to indicate modes of adaptation and “bounce back” to maintain coherence and structure. However, contemporary forms of resilience appear to be primarily about “bouncing back,” using crises to seek opportunities for transformation and the future. However, this debate on resilience as rebound or bounce forward risks hiding another, much more problematic, form of resilience in the Global South. Here, the governance of resilience instead produces problematic stagnation: the resilience paradox. Resilience governance initiatives in the Global South rarely support “rebounding”, arguing that local forms of government were problematic in terms of gender and age inclusion, while communities appear to lack self-governing capacities to “bounce back”. In these cases, focusing on resilience rather than traditional modes of humanitarian assistance and development has proven counterproductive, keeping communities in a state of suspension.
USAID projects working on the limits of post-independence rule in South Sudan recognize that building resilience has proven counterproductive, but at the same time the solution is still to attempt further improve resilience-building interventions. As a USAID project argues: “But putting communities in charge after decades of dependence on donors is difficult: communities are not used to tackling their own challenges, and implementing partners are often more comfortable with top-down approaches. » The paradox of resilience work is that external agencies view resilience support as working on the preconditions for autonomy rather than recognizing autonomy. The reason their projects fail may well be that resilience “experts” necessarily begin by problematizing local capacities and capacities rather than building on them.
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