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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life- Threatening Adversity

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DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.546

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-

Threatening Adversity
Helle Harnisch, Edith Montgomery, and Hans Henrik Knoop
Subject: Psychology and Other Disciplines, Social Psychology
Online Publication Date: Jun 2020 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.546

Summary and Keywords

The field of resilience research lacks conceptualizations of resilience that better reflect
the coercive conditions, contexts and experiences of human beings who face life-threaten­
ing adversity. The article provides historic context to definitions of resilience and under­
lines how resilience, when defined as an absence of psychopathology, is too narrow a per­
spective given the life-threatening adversity many human beings face; but nevertheless,
continue with life despite of. The article introduces “Forced Resilience” as a helpful con­
cept in drawing attention to experiences of life-threatening adversity, and how resilient
responses should not be deduced to whether psychopathology appears – or not, since
such understandings do not embrace the complexity of life-threatening adversity and
what human beings do to cope with it. Based on a qualitative empirical cultural case
study comprising 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork over 4 years among former
forcibly recruited children, youth, and adults in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda,
the article analyzes resilience as it appears among the children and youth in our study
who experienced numerous kill-or-get-killed situations, and who today, as adults, live in
continuous adverse circumstances. The article analyzes whether and how the emic, first-
person perspectives of the former forcibly recruited children, youth, and adults resonate
with state-of-the-art resilience and psychotraumatology studies. The results underline
how this is rarely the case. We argue that more careful and emic consideration is needed,
regarding how we define and evaluate what are pathological and resilient responses to
what types of adversity in the fast-growing field of resilience research. It is our hope that
“Forced resilience” will serve as a helpful concept, which through an experience-near ap­
proach can draw attention to resilience as it occurs amidst life-threatening adversity and
that this will contribute to a needed re-conceptualizing and contextualizing of resilience.

Keywords: appetitive aggression, avoidant coping, resilience, killing, life-threatening adversity, children and youth
associated with armed forces and groups, coping, survival

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

Introduction
In the rapidly expanding field of resilience research in psychological and psychiatric sci­
ence, investigators study human responses to different types of adversity and trauma
based on a broad variety of frameworks and approaches, with an abundance of definitions
of resilience as a result (Masten, 2018; Windle, Bennett, & Noyes, 2011). They use numer­
ous assessment tools to measure resilient responses, also often termed “positive adapta­
tion,” to adversity (Ager & Metzler, 2017; Bonanno, Romero, & Klein, 2015; Luthar, 2003;
Wright & Masten, 2015; Ungar & Liebenberg, 2011). This article conceptualizes and con­
textualizes what resilience might be in contexts of life-threatening adversity and exempli­
fies the issues with conceptualizing resilience empirically based on the emic perspectives
of children, youth, and adults who were violently abducted and forced to perpetrate often
lethal violence and torture in a 20-year-long brutal war in Northern Uganda. We argue
that in contexts where human beings are exposed to life-threatening adversity, responses
and adaptation processes to such toxic stress (Shonkoff et al., 2012) and prolonged trau­
ma (Hobfoll, Mancini, Hall, Canetti, & Bonnano, 2011) do not necessarily resonate with
how “positive adaptation” (Bonanno et al., 2015; Masten, 2011), “prosocial
behavior” (Luthar, 2003), and “resilient responses” (Barber, 2013) are assessed in re­
silience and psychotraumatology research and diagnostic manuals. Furthermore, this ar­
ticle rests on the empirical premise that in contexts of life-threatening adversity, careful
consideration is called for in regard to the living conditions that exist and how these res­
onate with cut-off points for and assessments of what are considered resilient responses
to adversity: to human beings who grow up with life-threatening adversity, the opportuni­
ty to choose between several outcomes is a rarely afforded luxury (Hobfoll et al., 2011;
Honwana, 2005; Shonkoff et al., 2012; Wessells, 2006). The lack of sustainable life trajec­
tories, choices, mobility, and opportunities in a context marked by ongoing life-threaten­
ing adversity such as dire poverty, violent conflict, climate crisis, and famine at times lead
to the perception that human beings in such contexts are defined by a lack of agency
(Barber, 2013; Betancourt, Meyers-Okhi, Charrow, & Tol, 2013A; Betancourt, Newnham,
McBain, & Brennan, 2013B; Bordonaro & Payne, 2012; Klasen, Oettingen, Daniels, Post,
Hoyer & Hubertus, 2010, Klasen, Gehrke, Metzner, Blotevogel, & Okello, 2013, Wessells,
2006). When children, youth, and adults experience brutal violence and at times are
forced to perpetrate such violence, they often become associated with armed forces and/
or groups that are perceived as morally dysfunctional; they often suffer from moral break­
down (Wainryb, 2011) or “moral injury” (Litz et al., 2009). A growing body of literature,
however, has documented that war-affected children and youth can and do display re­
silience in myriad ways amidst coercive and poor conditions for thriving and surviving
(Ager & Metzler, 2017; Betancourt, Meyers-Okhi, Charrow, & Tol, 2013A; Boothby &
Thomson, 2013; Boyden, 2003; Kerig & Wainryb, 2013; Klasen et al., 2010, 2013; Kohrt et
al., 2016; Akello et al., 2010; Vindevogel, Ager, Schiltz, Broekaert, & Derluyn, 2015; Wes­
sells, 2006, 2016), and that their moral compass has never been broken (Boyden, 2003;
Harnisch, 2018; Wessells, 2006).

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

The present study adds qualitative data to the field of resilience research, which mostly
consists of quantitative studies. The findings pose challenging questions to our conceptu­
alizations of resilience. How should we define positive adaptation and resilience in a con­
text marked by repeated kill-or-get-killed moments and prolonged war-related adversity?
Is it still “positive adaptation” if one survives but many perish? As a step forward in con­
ceptualizing resilience in an aggressive and lethal environment such as the one in the mil­
itant opposition group, which the women and men in our study survived, this article intro­
duces the concept “forced resilience.” The concept underlines the lethal coercive condi­
tions under which resilience, trauma, death, and at times aggression relate. To further
contextualize forced resilience apart from the present study, the concept draws on inter­
disciplinary research on “appetitive aggression,” trauma, children and youth associated
with armed forces and groups, toxic stress, and mass violence from a variety of cultural
contexts. The conclusion is that the coping strategies displayed by the children, youth,
and adults associated with armed forces and groups in our study present a nuanced and
delicate coexistence of aggression, avoidance, and resilience as a way of moving forward
during war and in the postwar adversity that prevails in the Acholi region today. The arti­
cle ends with a discussion of how the violent trajectories of resilience among forcibly re­
cruited children, youth, and adults point to a darker side of resilience, which challenges
moral perspectives on and clinical assessments of what resilience, and especially the
agency of children and youth, is perceived to be in war-affected contexts as well as in life-
threatening adversity in general.

Resilience Research

In the abundance of articles and book chapters on resilience in social and natural sci­
ence, numerous and contradictory accounts of the etiology of the term exist. According to
Alexander (2013), the term “resilience” derives from Latin. In the earliest appearances of
the term in writings by, for instance, Seneca the Elder (b. 54 BC–39 AD), resilire, or resilio
means to leap, bounce back, recoil, or avoid. Resilience research within psychology and
psychiatry emerged around 1970 among pioneer American researchers in developmental
psychology and psychiatry who studied children growing up in chronically adverse envi­
ronments, as well as studying identifiable factors (referred to as risk factors) that might
put a child at increased risk of developing psychopathology (Bonanno & Diminich, 2013;
Dahlgaard & Montgomery, 2015; Liebenberg & Ungar, 2009; Luthar, 2003; Punamäki,
Qouta, Miller, & El-Sarraj, 2011; Vindevogel et al., 2014; Werner, 2012; Werner & Smith,
1982; Wright, Masten, & Narayan, 2013). To their surprise, these studies revealed chil­
dren who, despite several risk factors, adapted to the adversity and did not develop psy­
chopathologies (Bonanno et al., 2015; Werner & Smith, 1982; Wright et al., 2013).

Since then, resilience has continued to be a rapidly expanding field of research (Bonanno
et al., 2015; Masten, 2018; Ungar, 2012; Wainryb, 2011; Werner & Smith, 1982) spanning
several academic disciplines such as physics, environmental studies, architecture, medi­
cine, and psychology as well as becoming a buzzword in the non-governmental organiza­
tion (NGO) industry and several intervention programs (Red Cross reports about re­
silience among young Syrians, CPC research, World Bank, etc.). Within the fields of psy­
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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

chology and psychiatry alone, numerous definitions of resilience and conceptual confu­
sion exist, as key terms are used inconsistently (Barber, 2013; Bonanno, 2012; Bonanno et
al., 2015; Dahlgaard & Montgomery, 2015; Luthar, 2003; Masten, 2018; Ungar, 2012; Vin­
devogel et al., 2015; Windle et al., 2011). An example is the inconsistent use of terms like
“risk factors,” “protective factors,” and “promotive factors.” This article aligns with the
definitions used in work by Wright and Masten (2015, p. 6), which defines risk factors as
“associated with an elevated probability of a negative outcome for a group of individu­
als.” Promotive factors are defined as assets and resources “associated with better adap­
tation in both high-risk and low-risk conditions” and protective factors are associated
with positive outcomes, particularly in the context of high risk or adversity, “a favorable
moderator of risk or adversity.”

Another conceptual confusion in resilience and psychotraumatology theory and research

is that it is not always clear whether responses being studied are to chronic trauma (Hob­
foll et al., 2011) or to singular potentially traumatic events (PTEs; Bonanno & Diminich,
2013) (Barber, 2013; Kirmayer, Lemelson, & Barad, 2007; Miller & Rasmussen, 2010).
Where the adversity is defined by both recurring PTEs, such as violent attacks or con­
flicts, and ongoing adversity such as poverty, oppression, and political turmoil, we need
more research and assessment tools tailored to such specific contexts of chronic war-re­
lated trauma and/or daily stressors (Miller & Rasmussen, 2010)—as well as systematic re­
views of whether and how such assessments can be compared to resilience studies in oth­
er contexts and populations.

The imbalance between the primarily etic approaches to resilience research, as opposed
to or seen in combination with a more emic-oriented approach to studying resilience, ex­
poses a shortcoming in the field. Without a contextualized explanation for exactly how re­
silience and pathology are perceived and defined in a particular population, and how this
resonates with respective assessment tools, results from resilience and psychotraumatol­
ogy studies can be questionable and thus call for more thorough contextualizing, situat­
ing, and specifying what trauma, adversity, and resilience mean in a given context (Bar­
ber, 2013; Bonanno et al., 2015; Miller & Rasmussen, 2010; Vindevogel et al., 2015; Wes­
sells et al., 2015).

Before introducing forced resilience, it is fitting to summarize the major influences in the
field of resilience research on which the concept of forced resilience rests.

Influential Approaches and Studies in Resilience Research

Despite differences between frameworks, study populations, and definitions used, many
resilience studies (Betancourt, Meyers-Okhi, Charrow, & Tol, 2013A; Betancourt, Newn­
ham, McBain, & Brennan, 2013B; Liebenberg & Ungar, 2009; Theron, Liebenberg, & Un­
gar, 2015; Wright & Masten, 2015) build on a highly influential framework within re­
silience research in the social sciences, namely, Bronfenbrenner’s social ecology theory
and model for human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Masten, 2018). In
Bronfenbrenner’s theory, human beings are perceived as organic systems in continuous,

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

dynamic development and interaction processes with their surroundings.

Bronfenbrenner’s social ecology theory advocates for the perception that individual, so­
cial, cultural, and material or physical resources are all crucial parts in the dynamic sys­
tem exchanges that define our human way of being and interacting in the world, and
which comprise the five systems that Bronfenbrenner referred to as micro-, meso-, exo-,
macro-, and chronosystems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

Various frameworks in resilience research can be distinguished from each other by look­
ing to this model and noticing whether the focus in the respective studies is primarily on
the individual level or, for instance, identifies resilience on a community level. Most
frameworks, however, acknowledge that resilience correlates reside not in one realm or
system of a person’s life but that peer relations and societal and cultural values, as well
as security and safety, indeed play crucial roles when coping with adversity (Seccombe,
2002; Ungar, 2012; Wessells, 2016).

With a more contextual emphasis on the social ecology approach, Seccombe (2002) urges
resilience researchers to look at the structures for caretaking and potential for thriving in
a society, rather than defining, assessing, and placing responsibility for resilience, or lack
thereof, at an individual, family, or community level:

The widely held view of resiliency as an individual disposition, family trait, or com­
munity phenomenon is insufficient. . . resiliency cannot be understood or im­
proved in significant ways by merely focusing on these individual-level factors. In­
stead careful attention must be paid to the structural deficiencies in our society
and to the social policies that families need in order to become stronger, more
competent, and better functioning in adverse situations.

(Seccombe, 2002, p. 385)

Culturally Sensitive Frameworks for Studying Resilience

In a recent book (Theron et al., 2015), Theron, Liebenberg, Ungar, and Masten, among
others, join efforts in a call for a more globalized and culturally sensitive approach to re­
silience research. Theron and Liebenberg in their chapter of the book define the goal of
resilience research as one of “informing practice and supporting the lives of marginalized
and vulnerable youth, through which a commitment to social justice is implied and care­
ful consideration of culture is essential” (Theron & Liebenberg, in Theron et al., 2015, p.
32).

With inspiration from Bronfenbrenner’s social ecology theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979),

Masten studies resilience, which she often refers to as positive adaptation, primarily
among at-risk children and youth in the United States. Masten (2011, p. 294) defines re­
silience as “The capacity of a dynamic system to withstand or recover from significant
challenges that threaten its stability, viability, or development.” Furthermore, Wright et
al. (2013), based on the results of more than four decades of resilience research, have
identified a short list of resilience correlates, also referred to as protective factors associ­

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

ated with “positive adaptation” to significant adversity. This short list of reilience corre­
lates informs the analysis of the empirical data from our cultural case study about re­
sponses to ongoing war-related adversity in the Acholi region among former forcibly re­
cruited Acholi children and youth.

This short list aims at and is helpful in providing a general overview of the protective and
promotive factors that correlate with building resilience across cultural and socioeconom­
ic contexts. It is organized along Bronfenbrenner’s social ecology model of the micro-,
meso-, exo-, macro-, and chronosystem through which human beings interact with their
surroundings (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Wright et al., 2013). The researchers start from the
top of the list with what they refer to as “child characteristics” (for instance, “effective
emotional and behavioral regulation strategies” and “ability to form and maintain positive
peer relationships”) and which relate to the microsystem in Bronfenbrenner’s social ecol­
ogy theory and model (Wright et al., 2013, p. 21). The short list then, like
Bronfenbrenner’s model, moves outward from the microsystem toward the macrosystem,
thus moving from child characteristics and close peer relationships toward community
characteristics (for instance, “safe neighborhood,” “low level of community violence,” and
“effective schools”), and ending with cultural or societal characteristics (for instance,
“prevention of and protection from oppression or political violence”) (Wright et al., 2013,
p. 21).

Various Models for Resilience Studies

Recent contributions in resilience research are striving for consensus and clarity by ex­
plaining how the expanding field of resilience research can be divided into three types of
models for resilience studies: person-focused models, variable-focused models, and path­
ways and trajectories, or hybrid-focused, models (Wright & Masten, 2015). While person-
focused models focus on the individual person, the variable-focused model uses multivari­
ate statistics to study the effects of a variable on an outcome (Wright & Masten, 2015).
While the variable-focused model methodology is different from the research methodolo­
gy in our study, the knowledge generated by the large body of variable-focused resilience
research has informed our study. For instance, we have paid close attention in fieldwork
to the social relationships of the Acholi over the years, as findings across paradigms in re­
silience research show that close social relations across contexts repeatedly are identi­
fied as one of the most crucial factors in fostering resilience (Wright & Masten, 2015; Vin­
devogel et al., 2014, 2015). Finally, methods of resilience research concerned with hybrid
models are becoming increasingly sophisticated (Bonanno et al., 2015; Galatzer-Levy et
al., 2018; Wright & Masten, 2015). In longitudinal studies of pathways and trajectories of
coping with adversity, four patterns of adaptation have been identified, namely, (a) stress
resistance, (b) recovery patterns, (c) normalization—also referred to as emergent re­
silience by Bonanno and Diminich (2013), and (d) transformational or growth patterns
(Wright & Masten, 2015). Whereas stress resistance describes a seemingly undisturbed
way of life and reactions when experiencing adversity, recovery patterns entail respond­
ing to adversity potentially with very intense reactions but then returning to live life and
function as well as before the stressful event. However, the resilience literature, and men­

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

tioned in the “INTRODUCTION,” does not explicitly identify how this pattern would look
in contexts of both acute stress and ongoing adversity. Furthermore, we dispute the terms
“negative reactions” or “negative emotions” (Wright & Masten, 2015, p. 15), as they belie
the fact that emotions of sadness, grief, shock, or anger are all natural responses to an
experience of adversity or a shocking threat to our system. Emergent resilience (Bonanno
& Diminich, 2013), or normalization, is a response which emerges over time in a context
of ongoing adversity to which the child or adult adapts. In their article, Bonanno and Di­
minich encourage trauma and resilience scholars to distinguish more clearly whether
their study of adversity and resilience entails single-event trauma and minimal-impact re­
silience or ongoing adversity or chronic trauma, which then would make emergent re­
silience a more accurate definition of resilience (Bonanno & Diminich, 2013). The fact
that such contributions in resilience research do not offer reflections on how to define,
study, or assess resilience when the stressors are both acute and singular and a result of
ongoing diverse living conditions, such as war, political turmoil, oppression, and dire
poverty, illuminates the shortcomings of such models for research, since a record high
70.8 million displaced people often face both acute, singular trauma and ongoing adversi­
ty around the world today, according to UNHCR (2019).

Psychotraumatology and Resilience Studies among War-affected Children

and Youth
The tendency in resilience research to define resilience as the absence of psychopatholo­
gy despite exposure to significant adversity (Medeiros, Shrestha, Gaire, & Orr, 2020;
Wright et al., 2013) challenges issues of contextualizing and specifying what is meant
both by resilience and by the adversity to which the resilience is a response. Contribu­
tions to resilience research carried out in war-affected communities creates an important
mirror to the field of resilience research.

Thankfully, several scholars have contributed significantly to exploring and documenting

responses to such war-related trauma and suffering among war-affected children and
youth. This includes the study of children associated with armed forces and groups (Akel­
lo, Reis, & Richters, 2010; Betancourt, Meyers-Okhi, Charrow, & Tol, 2013A; Betancourt,
Newnham, McBain, & Brennan, 2013B; Boothby, Crawford, & Halprin, 2006; Honwana,
2005; Klasen et al., 2010, Kohrt, Worthman, Adhikari, Luitel, Arevalo, Ma, and Cole, 2016;
Waynrib, 2011; Wessells, 2006), war-affected children and youth growing up in the West
Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (Al-krenawi & Kimberley, 2014; Hobfoll et al., 2011;
Punamäki et al., 2011), and refugees (Dalhgaard & Montgomery, 2015; Kirmayer et al.,
2007; Montgomery, 2010). From the Acholi region, several resilience and psychotrauma­
tology studies focus on populations of children and youth associated with armed forces
and groups, who were forcibly recruited during the 20-year-long civil war in Northern
Uganda (Bayer et al., 2007; Betancourt & Kahn, 2008; Betancourt & Williams, 2008;
Branch, 2011; Harnisch & Montgomery, 2017; Harnisch & Pfeiffer, 2018; Hermenau et al.,
2013; Klasen et al., 2010, 2013; Vindevogel et al., 2014; Wessells, 2006). Emanating from
the same Acholi context are studies documenting socioeconomic consequences of the war
which are comorbid with detrimental mental health issues and less resilient responses to

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

war and violent mobilization among children and youth (Kizza, Hjelmeland, Kinyanda, &
Knizek, 2012A; Okello, Onen, & Musisi, 2007; Pham, Vinck, & Stover, 2009, to mention a
few). Studies report that among a study population of former forcibly recruited children
and youth in the Acholi region, 27% to 34.9% developed posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) (Bayer et al., 2007; Okello et al., 2007), as well as reported widespread suicide in
the region (Kizza, Knizek, Kinyanda, & Hjelmeland, 2012B). Recently, however, Klasen et
al. (2013) referred to previous studies assessing PTSD among children and youth associ­
ated with armed forces and groups in the Acholi region, including a study of her own, and
suggested that PTSD might not be the most useful diagnosis to assess, or the best frame­
work, when documenting mental health effects of war-related trauma among this popula­
tion of children and youth. As an alternative, Klasen and colleagues (Ibid, 2013) argue
alongside researchers and clinicians such as Bessel van Der Kolk (2005) that the diagno­
sis of developmental trauma disorder (DTD) might better capture how children respond
to trauma.

Biocultural Anthropology Framework and Studies of “Molecular Resilience”

Brandon A. Kohrt is a psychiatrist who works with community-based interventions among
populations affected by political violence in Asia and Africa, including former forcibly re­
cruited or mobilized children from state and non-state forces and groups. Kohrt’s work is
based in medical anthropology, in the subfield of biocultural anthropology. His studies fo­
cus on cross-cultural variations of social adversity during childhood and adolescence, and
on “molecular resilience.” The research methodology in this field entails evaluating gene-
expression profiles, with a specific focus on activation of a conserved transcriptional re­
sponse to adversity (CTRA) (Kohrt et al., 2016). The studies published by Kohrt and col­
leagues make much needed and interesting contributions to the field of resilience re­
search and to trauma theory and psychotraumatology studies, with a welcome focus on
children and youth associated with armed forces and groups. Kohrt et al., as well as re­
searchers from the Konstanz University psychotraumatology unit, such as Elbert, Weier­
stall, Nandi, Schauer, Pfeiffer, Neuner, and Hecker, are among the few research teams
that carry out gene-expression studies among populations associated with armed forces
and groups. Gene-expression studies have revealed that chronic exposure to adverse so­
cial environments is associated with molecular dynamics, which have implications for
“cardiovascular neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric conditions such as anxiety
and depression” (Kohrt et al., 2016, p. 1). In their study among Nepalese children and
youth affected by war and Nepalese children and youth associated with armed forces and
groups, Kohrt et al. found that individual self-perceptions of personal psychological re­
silience even in this non-individualistic society were associated with “markedly lower
CTRA gene-expression profiles, to the extent where PTSD affected former child soldiers
with high levels of self-reported resilience showed molecular profiles comparable to those
of PTSD-free civilian youth” (Kohrt et al., 2016, p. 3). This, and other results in the study,
led the researchers to suggest that interventions that target healing in war-affected popu­
lations rather than focusing strictly on PTSD symptom reduction would benefit from re­
silience-promoting approaches.

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

Cultural Case Study in Northern Uganda

During the two-decades-long war between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and Presi­
dent Museveni’s government army in the Acholi region from 1986 to 2006, more than
60,000 children and youth were forcibly recruited into the LRA, with more than 1,000
children and youth still missing in Gulu town alone (Annan, Blattman, & Horton, 2006;
Harnisch & Montgomery, 2017).

Across academic disciplines the picture is often bleak, and the consequences of the atroc­
ities documented result in alarming statistics: During the most recent war between the
LRA led by Joseph Kony and the government forces led by President Museveni, a study of
children and youth associated with armed forces and groups in the Acholi region found
that 97–98% suffer from clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS)
(Amone-P’Olak, Garnefski, & Kraaij, 2007), and that 27% to 34.9% developed PTSD (Bay­
er et al., 2007; Okello et al., 2007).

A study from 2012 of war-affected Acholi adolescents, six years after the ceasefire in the
region, reported that 57% showed clinically significant PTSS and documented that ab­
ducted adolescents were more likely to have symptoms associated with depression and
anxiety than those who had not been abducted (McMullen et al., 2012). Studies from the
region within the field of psychology and psychiatry thus speak to pathology, including a
PTSD diagnosis. Portraits of an Acholi people as struck and stuck by collective trauma
take center stage. Laura Edmondson, through the lens of “market,” reflects on Northern
Uganda as a global stage with international players: politicians, NGOs, and the receiving
public hand out roles for the local population to take on and reproduce in order to fit
within the code of conduct of how to self-promote ones position on the global market (Ed­
mondson, 2005, p. 453). Indeed, narratives of war and the figure of the African child sol­
dier (Moynagh, 2011) at times and at certain places within urban settings in the Acholi
region seem performed, routinized, and conformed (Lanken, 2012); in more rural set­
tings, where the NGOs and researchers are more sparsely represented, not so much—if
ever. After 12 years of negative peace (Finnström, 2003) and despite progress in the
Acholi region, whether in a rural outback or bustling urban context, rumors and anticipa­
tion of when and how war will break out again manifests in conversations, alert glances,
ways of living after the war, the silencing of past atrocities, and political oppression, and
overt poverty continues to disrupt and break families and sustainable livelihoods apart in
the region today: as a saying goes in the region; “Hurry up, start eating! You never know
when the bullets will start flying.”

Methodology

Through 10 months of qualitative ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, we

collected life stories of and follow-up interviews with 36 former forcibly recruited chil­
dren and youth. As the fieldwork progressed, numerous stories surfaced of being abduct­
ed at gunpoint and entering a lethal environment in a war, which made use of daily
graphic torture, sexual violence, and killings. These atrocities have been richly document­

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

ed in reports as well as in trauma and resilience studies (Annan et al., 2006; Betancourt &
Williams, 2008; Boyden, 2003; HRW Uganda, 2009; Klasen et al., 2013; Klasen et al., 2010;
Wessells, 2006). The data comprise 42 narrative life story interviews, 41 follow-up inter­
views, 3 focus groups interviews, and 2 assessment interviews related to the clinical as­
sessment of “appetitive aggression” (Weierstall & Elbert, 2011).

The first author’s fieldwork inquired about responses to such war-related adversity, and
what enabled the 36 former forcefully recruited children, women, and men in the study to
physically and socially survive during their time in an aggressive and lethal violent envi­
ronment while they served as child soldiers and combatants with the LRA—and after com­
ing home when facing poverty and difficult reintegration and healing processes.

Participants
The 36 youth and adults (18 females, age 15–38 at the onset of the study in 2012 and 18
males, age 18–41) were all forcibly recruited into the Lord’s Resistance Army when the
majority were children and youth. The mean age of abduction for the 36 participants in
this study is 9.8 years.

Ethics
The Ethical Approval Committee at Gulu University, Faculty of Medicine approved the
study, and all study participants gave oral and written informed consent. Anonymity has
been ensured by masking names and locations of study participants. Permission from rel­
evant local community leaders in the Acholi region was obtained at all fieldwork sites. For
all four years of the study, we returned to the Acholi women and men with the same
Acholi interpreter. Participants who wished to speak to a counselor, or who the Acholi re­
search assistant and author considered in need of counseling were referred to counselors
already working in the area.

Summary of Findings

The findings in this study have been thoroughly described elsewhere (Harnisch & Mont­
gomery, 2017). Here, we offer only a brief summary of the findings as they relate to the
main purpose of this article, which is to address the need of introducing “forced re­
silience” as a useful concept to contextualize responses to life-threatening adversity.

The data showed two main categories of coping: (a) avoidant coping, with subcategories
such as suppression of vulnerable emotions and memories related to traumatic events
and silencing, and (b) confrontational coping, with less prevalent subcategories such as
“appetitive aggression/the urge to kill.” The empirical data illuminated that the most
prevalent coping strategies and responses to war-related suffering, trauma, and ongoing
adversity among the former forcibly recruited children and youth in the study from the
Acholi region is avoidant coping (33 of 36 study participants). Avoidant coping responses
were expressed in a variety of ways among all the youth and adults in the study: support­
ing previous findings (Akello et al., 2006), our study comprising 86 qualitative interviews
and numerous conversations with both former forcibly recruited and non-recruited

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

women and men in the Acholi region conveyed that between them, the stories and past
experiences from the LRA were to be silenced and “forgotten.” Life story interviews and
the many follow-up interviews showed a variety of avoidant coping responses such as (a)
avoidance of thinking about and displaying vulnerable emotions or responses when facing
threats and adversity during forced recruitment, (b) complete silence during and after the
war of experiences of witnessing and carrying out violence, torture, and killings in the
LRA, as well as (c) complete silence about war experiences and postwar stigmatization
with both close and more distant support systems such as parents and community mem­
bers.

Social relations and cultural ties in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda are still subject
to extremely violent conflict. As a part of the initiation rituals and hardening strategies in
the LRA, new members of the LRA were ordered to attack their own villages. Widespread
suspicion from both Museveni’s government forces and the LRA about civilians in the
Acholi region collaborating with the enemy was punished with graphic torture and
killings. One of the young men in our study had been abducted into the LRA when he was
seven years old by his uncle and was forced to beat to death fellow abducted Acholi who
had tried to escape during the abduction. In addition, he was made to carry out abduc­
tions from his home village. He forcefully abducted three sons from his neighbors in his
home village. Two of the sons never returned. Such incidents complicate postwar life and
reintegration processes when former LRA members return home to their villages, regard­
less of whether they were forcefully abducted or volunteered to join the LRA. The
avoidant coping, then, including the silence, serves as a way to nurture postwar coexis­
tence in relative social harmony (Porter, 2016), and what Finnström calls a fragile nega­
tive peace (2003). Many of the youth and adults in our study could not get themselves to
convey to their parents and home community what they had witnessed as children in the
LRA, how much torture they themselves had endured, or the violence they had been
forced to carry out after being abducted into the LRA. The avoidant coping and silencing
of suffering thus function as ways to live up to local Acholi notions of appropriately cop­
ing with adversity and issues related to the war (Akello et al., 2006; Harnisch & Mont­
gomery, 2017; Porter, 2016), which spares one’s community from more suffering. Carry­
ing one’s pain alone and suffering in silence is perceived as a strength and as socially de­
sirable. Avoidant coping becomes taking care of concerned parents and nurturing the lo­
cal notion of “not over-thinking what happened in the bush” and how “carrying your pain
by yourself” is promoted as morally appreciated compassion for loved ones and the
greater community (Harnisch & Montgomery, 2017). Avoidant coping and silencing
strategies serve as a way for the individual Acholi to “forgive and forget.” This phrase
was used daily in the Acholi region as an idiom for moving on after years of brutal vio­
lence and war.

Other ways of coping that were identified in the study entail spiritual activities, distrac­
tion (keeping yourself busy), as well as more aggressive responses, such as appetitive ag­
gression. Appetitive aggression is experienced as an addiction to violence, a bodily urge
to act violently and to kill (Harnisch & Pfeiffer, 2018). Appetitive aggression and the urge
to kill are locally explained as signs of possession by evil spirits, cen (Harnisch & Pfeiffer,
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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

2018; Meinert & Whyte, 2018, 2017; Neuner et al., 2012). In psychotraumatology re­
search, however, appetitive aggression is perceived as an adaptive response, which has
proven to serve as a resilient buffer against traumatization and mental health pathologies
in contexts of severe, violent trauma and ongoing life-threatening adversity (Hecker et
al., 2013; Schauer & Elbert, 2010; Weierstall, Huth, Knecht, Nandi, & Elbert, 2012). The
adaptation to the coercive environment in the LRA, especially by forcibly recruited boys
who served as soldiers and later as commanders, entailed participating in sophisticated
and brutal methods of torture and killing. Such aggressive adaptation and behavior are
described in several interviews with most of the Acholi women and men in this study and
in related literature (Boyden, 2003; Hecker et al., 2013; Honwana, 2005; Wessells, 2006)
as advancing chances of survival, in-group protection, and acknowledgement in armed
forces and groups while at war; when returning home, however, the adaptive response of
appetitive aggression is experienced as detrimental to reintegration and a sense of be­
longing by the ones who return from war and by their receiving home community (Har­
nisch, 2018; Harnisch & Pfeiffer, 2018). Finally, it is important to note that appetitive ag­
gression responses as well as spiritual responses coexist with avoidant coping strategies
and their inherent silencing strategies in the Acholi region.

Discussion and Critical Issues

It is important to critically reflect on how the reviewed resilience research, including

studies among human beings exposed to life-threatening adversity, resonate with Wright,
Masten, and Narayan’s short list—as well as with our cultural case study from the Acholi
region in Northern Uganda, where the circumstances were brutally violent and entailed
acute life-threatening stressors as well as prolonged, life-threatening adversity.

What unites the broad variety of frameworks, approaches, and definitions of resilience in
resilience research is the emphasis on the dynamic exchange that influences how a hu­
man being reacts and adapts to adversity, whether acute or chronic. In addition, across as
diverse a set of frameworks as biocultural anthropology gene-expression studies (Kohrt et
al., 2016) of resilience, qualitative ethnographic studies (Akello et al., 2010), and across
cultural contexts, the correlates of resilience on Wright, Masten, and Narayan’s short list
seem to be confirmed. The studies agree on highlighting emotion regulation, self-per­
ceived problem-solving skills, and resilience; quality of social support systems; level of se­
curity; and access to material resources as key correlates of what promotes individual as
well as community resilience, that is, a positive adaptation to adversity. Despite agree­
ments across resilience frameworks and studies in different cultural settings on resilience
correlates (Bonanno et al., 2015; Buse et al., 2013; Kohrt et al., 2016; Windle et al., 2011),
resilience research does face several critical issues.

One issue in the fields of psychotraumatology and psychiatry studies, which is also ad­
dressed in cultural psychology (Buse et al., 2013) and medical anthropology studies (Kir­
mayer et al., 2007), is how the diagnostic manuals such as DSM 5 fail to consider the con­
textualized experience, and local idioms of distress and signs of war-related trauma, and
of suffering and well-being (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Carrey & Ungar,

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

2007; Harnisch & Montgomery, 2017; Harnisch & Pfeiffer, 2018). Based on our review
and empirical case study, we argue that a similar problem occurs in resilience studies
among war-affected children and youth. Existing examples of adaptation and resilience do
not fit with standardized models—or even go against what is categorized as healthy re­
sponses, positive adaptation, and resilience in the face of adversity, with avoidant coping
being a key example.

The findings of the avoidant as well as the aggressive coping responses (Klasen et al.,
2013; Neuner et al., 2012; Vindevogel et al., 2015; Wessells, 2006), including in our study
from the Acholi region, illuminate the need for reconceptualizing what resilience entails
among human beings who live in life-threatening adversity in general, and specifically
among former forcibly recruited children and youth.

There are several pertinent questions for this reconceptualization. What kind of respons­
es do trauma and life-threatening adversity allow and call for? Do widely used categories
such as “positive adaptation” and “prosocial” and “antisocial behavior” (Luthar, 2003) ap­
ply when facing life-threatening adversity, including experiences of forced recruitment
among former forcibly abducted children and youth? And, on a more general level, what
besides flexibility is lost in the pursuit of providing a universally applicable framework for
defining resilience and the use of diagnostic models described in etic, universal terms?
We shall discuss some of these questions as they point to challenges in the field of re­
silience research and the need for introducing the concept of “forced resilience.”

Types of Adversity and Possibilities for Practicing Resilience Corre­

lates

Punamäki et al. (2011), who study mental health effects among war-affected Palestinian
children, draw attention to how some of the resilience correlates, also referred to as pro­
tective factors, that seem universal across contexts and cultures in fostering resilience
(Buse et al., 2013) and appear on the short list of Wright et al. (2013), are harder to effec­
tuate in some contexts marked by certain types of adversity than in others. An example is
supportive parenting practices. Punamäki argues that providing supportive parenting
practices is more complex in a context of war than in a context where the challenges are
primarily socioeconomic (Punamäki et al., 2011). Punamäki’s argument underlines the
problematic lack of distinguishing between resilience studies that represent adversity in
what Ungar and Liebenberg (2011) term the “minority world” of Euro-American contexts
—and how these studies speak of their findings as if they represent the majority world.
The lack of distinction between contexts and their respective type of adversity disregards
socioeconomic variations, safety, and cultural variations and biases.

This relates to a second critical issue in the field of resilience research: the conceptual
confusion in resilience and psychotraumatology theory and research. This confusion per­
sists in part because of the already mentioned problem of not making explicit whether a
trauma study focuses on responses to chronic trauma (Hobfoll et al., 2011) or to PTEs,
and whether the trauma is interpersonal, societal, and/or political (Barber, 2013; Bonanno

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

et al., 2015; Bonanno & Diminich, 2013; Kirmayer et al., 2007; Miller & Rasmussen, 2010).
Furthermore, Theresa Betancourt in her definitions of resilience aligns with Bonanno,
who states that assessing resilience by applying a deficit focus and defining resilience as
the absence of psychopathology is a “conceptual redundancy” (Bonanno, 2012, p. 754).
Although many approaches support this view, numerous studies still assess resilience as
the absence of psychopathology (Bonanno et al., 2015; Klasen et al., 2013; Medeiros et
al., 2020) with, for instance, Ungar and Liebenberg as welcome exceptions (Ungar &
Liebenberg, 2013). More clarity regarding what kinds of adversity and trauma are under
study and how such studies relate to other studies in different cultural contexts is called
for.

To circumvent some of the issues in the field of resilience research, Bonanno et al. (2015)
in a recent article proposed a model for resilience research comprising four temporal ele­
ments which resilience researchers need to include in their studies: (a) “baseline or pre-
adversity adjustment,” (b) “the actual adverse circumstances themselves,” (c) “post-ad­
versity resilient outcomes, referenced to both the aversive circumstances and baseline
adjustment,” and (d) “predictors of resilient outcomes measured prior to, during and af­
ter the adverse circumstances” (Bonanno et al., 2015, p. 140). While this model indeed is
helpful to systematize and optimize resilience research and poignantly addresses many of
the current challenges in the field, the model is made for quantitative resilience research
and does not consider qualitative resilience research. Clearly, the model’s use of the term
“post-adversity” hardly is applicable in contexts of chronic crises, such as war and forced
recruitment of children and youth, and the many dire, long-term consequences of war. Fi­
nally, there is not much “post-adversity” about living in poverty and the abundance of
everyday emergencies poverty entails. This is a problem and, again, calls for more contex­
tualization in the process of conceptualizing resilience and developing study designs, as
well as calling for situating and specifying what trauma, adversity, resilience, well-being,
and recovery mean in any given study context. In this pursuit, emic notions of adversity
and resilience explored and identified through qualitative approaches (Barber, 2013;
Miller & Rasmussen, 2010; Theron et al., 2015; Wessells et al., 2015) that can supplement
the mostly quantitative research methodologies in resilience research are called for.

On a societal, national, and global political level, another problem grows with the in­
creased attention paid to resilience worldwide. Assessments of resilience in populations
around the world and within regions of countries are used to make economic and political
decisions about where in the world to intervene and invest resources. Whether a popula­
tion or a group of children in one context is assessed and considered resilient is, we ar­
gue, a local, national, and global political issue, and an arena where decision-making has
far-reaching consequences; they can ultimately mean the difference between survival and
death. Too few researchers of resilience, psychotraumatology, and PTSD studies address
this political issue explicitly due to the inherent tendency to focus on the individual level.

On a more positive note, recent resilience research across resilience studies in non-war-
affected and war-affected contexts has generated the positive and persistent findings that
resilience is a more natural response to human adversity than traumatization (Bonanno,

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

2012; Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Galatzer-Levy et al., 2018; Newnham et al., 2015; Wright
& Masten, 2015). Many scholars agree with Garbarino (2000), though, who, based on his
long career of studying youth and inner-city violence, argued that “some environments
are too much for anyone” (cited in Wright & Masten, 2015, p. 10). For instance, Wright
and Masten align with Garbarino and with Luthar et al. (2000) when stressing that we
need to be careful with how we judge behaviors. They write that

“Even characteristics commonly linked to resilience (e.g., good problem-solving

skills) do not provide absolute buffers to stressful life events; there are situations
so hostile and threatening, such as prolonged deprivation and maltreatment, that
no child would be expected to develop well”

(Wright & Masten, 2015, p. 10).

First, the data in the study from the Acholi region challenge such statements. The Acholi
context, although certainly a different cultural context, entails many of the same risk fac­
tors as the context Garbarino describes in his studies of high-risk youth in inner cities and
which he refers to as an environment “too much for anyone.” And the lives the Acholi
women and men in the study have lived up to now, certainly also entail “situations so hos­
tile and threatening” with “prolonged deprivation and maltreatment, that no child would
be expected to develop well.” The women and men in our study shared experiences of
growing up with witnessing family and village members being brutally tortured in the 20-
year-long war, having to leave their family behind due to violent abductions, being raped
on a weekly basis for months and sometimes years as a child, and being forced to kill an­
other human being while still a child. Many of the Acholi, considering what they have sur­
vived and moved through, despite being children while in the lethal LRA environment,
nevertheless develop relatively well. However vague the appearance of relativity in such
a statement makes the statement, the mentioning of relativity is inescapable and neces­
sary. The relativity, however, does not preclude or diminish the resilience that many for­
mer forcibly recruited Acholi women and men continue to demonstrate in Northern Ugan­
da today (Harnisch & Montgomery, 2017). According to local standards of living a proper
life (Akello et al., 2010; Harnisch & Montgomery, 2017; P’Bitek, 1966/2013), and accord­
ing to their own judgment, to community observations, and our fieldwork observations,
the majority of the women and men in our study are functioning well, with their biggest
challenge being the everyday emergencies that accompany dire poverty, such as not be­
ing able to pay the school bills, to secure enough food, and to access proper medical help,
findings that resonate with other studies (Klasen et al., 2013; Kostelny & Wessells, 2008;
Wessells, 2006) from war-torn contexts such as Mozambique (Boothby et al., 2006, Booth­
by & Thomson, 2013) and Nepal (Medeiros et al., 2020)

This underlines the need to address a second issue in resilience research. We as scholars
and interventionists concerned with resilience need to carefully inspect how our expecta­
tions of children and youth in extreme adversity to “do well,” “develop well,” or have no
possibility of “developing well” influence our encounters with, analysis of, and interven­
tions targeting the subjects we study. What does well-being, resilience, and psychopathol­

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

ogy mean in a context of war and chronic adversity? What does it mean to “develop
well” (Wright & Masten, 2015)? Or to use Bonanno’s term, what is “normal
development” (Bonanno et al., 2015, p. 145) when growing up with war and poverty,
when being subjected to violence, structural and physical, and when one has been forced
to kill another human being, or several, while still a child or adolescent? While answering
these questions is not what this article set out to do, we wish to pose the questions to ad­
dress two issues from the cultural case study that underline the complications of re­
silience research:

1. The forced encampment and decades of war and poverty in the Acholi region have
meant, according to many Acholi, an erosion of Acholi culture and sense of communi­
ty. This means that agreements on what are culturally appropriate ways of behaving
and coping with adversity are not easy to come by and would change between gener­
ations, between urban and rural populations, and between genders (Harnisch &
Montgomery, 2017; Meinert & Whyte, 2017.
2. Many of the former forcibly recruited children and youth who the first author fol­
lowed closely over four years, and their many fellow human beings in similar circum­
stances, would hardly be categorized as resilient or “developing well” in the existing
normative models and publications in resilience research. Some of them display re­
sponses which would be perceived as symptoms of psychopathology (Luthar, 2003),
such as flashbacks, dissociative states, aggressive behavior, substance abuse, and/or
avoidant behavior. One example in our study from the Acholi region is a young man,
whom we shall refer to as Janus. With his alcohol abuse and avoidant coping pat­
terns, Janus would by many scholars in medicine, psychiatry, and psychology and ac­
cording to the European and American diagnostic manuals (ICD 10 and DSM 5) be
perceived as traumatized, and highly unlikely to pass as resilient if included in quan­
titative studies on responses to adversity (Luthar, 2003). At a highly stimulating in­
terdisciplinary conference about trauma, memory, and media, I presented a five-
minute video with Janus. Prominent international scholars based in psychiatry insist­
ed that what was conveyed in the video was not coping flexibility (Birk & Bonanno,
2016), and certainly not resilience, but a young man “clearly agitated” and suffering
from dissociative identity disorder.

One year later, during the first author’s latest visit to the Acholi region in April 2016,
Janus had stopped drinking, managed to land himself a job, and built a house for his wife
and son to move into—he was excited and proud. This raises a general question of when
do we make our assessment? Do we have enough knowledge and time to ensure the quali­
ty of our assessments and analysis? What happens after the researchers leave the field to
write their analysis and conclusions about resilient and/or pathological responses in a giv­
en context? In a phone call in 2018, I learned that Janus’ sondied after having fallen ill
with malaria. No transport was available to the hospital in the rural outback of Northern
Uganda, and there was no money to pay the medical bill had they been able to go to the
hospital. Treating malaria is rather simple; in this case, poverty killed Janus’s son.

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

What is surprisingly shunned within the field of resilience research, but not among the
scholars critiquing the field from the outside, is the notion that accurate results about
who displays resilient responses to adversity, or not, are complicated to come by. Norma­
tively based assessment models of positive adaption, that is, resilience and “who develops
well,” have a judgmental premise (Wright et al., 2013). This brings into the assessment
and eventual diagnostic pursuits the question of whether our assessments are fair to the
situated human being in front of us, and whether they are locally and culturally appropri­
ate (Kirmayer et al., 2007). Who will determine the categories and the cut-off point for
“developing well,” for resilient responses, for positive adaptation, for psychopathology?
Will the results be accurate? Will they be fair? Who is to evaluate, and how will they do
so, whether Janus, violently abducted into the Lord’s Resistance Army at age 10, killing
another human being for the first time at age 11, and stigmatized by his closest family up­
on homecoming, is developing well in the aftermath of war and ongoing toxic stress? This
sore point is poignantly addressed when Kidron (2009) and Lambek in his comment to the
article by Kidron (2009) underline that studying, assessing, or describing pathologies in­
escapably is also an exercise of moralizing. So is, we add, studying, assessing, and de­
scribing resilience.

Belsky and Pluess also address the problem inherent in working with concepts such as
“optimal development” as well as psychopathology in general terms by illuminating how
some circumstances of living call for responses that might transgress dominant views of
what is categorized as normal, optimal, and pathological behavior and development:

“Thus, in addition to considering the possible benefits of behavior regarded by

many as dysregulated and problematic, students of development and psy­
chopathology would be well advised to consider, what the costs may be of behav­
ing, given the circumstances some live in, in those ways that mainstream thinking
labels as optimal”

(Belsky & Pluess, 2013, p. 1245).

The quote encourages us to consider with great caution how we assess, judge, and ana­
lyze behavior in any context, but this responsibility becomes even more pertinent to live
up to when studying contexts of life-threatening adversity. We align with Lazarus and
Folkman, who argued that judgment should always be contextualized, and that coping
should not be mistaken for what they termed “mastery over the environment.” They
write, “many sources of stress cannot be mastered, and effective coping under these con­
ditions is what allows the person to tolerate, minimize, accept or ignore what cannot be
mastered” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p. 140). Minimizing and ignoring certainly reflects
the avoidant coping and silencing, and how these were the most prevalent responses in
the empirical data from the Acholi region in our study. Diagnostic manuals, however, ad­
here avoidant responses to symptoms of pathology, as avoidance is listed as a symptom of
PTSD (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Based on the findings in our study from
the Acholi region, we argue, that in the specific Acholi context, as well as in other well-
described studies of severe human trauma and/or adversity (Akello et al., 2010; Boothby

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

et al., 2006; Darlington, 1996; Elzy et al., 2013; Honwana, 2005; Laub, 2015; Rosenblum,
2009), responses such as avoidant coping and silencing can also be understood as re­
silient coping in that they serve the survival and functionality of dynamic human systems
and their communities in ways rendered culturally appropriate by the local community it­
self as they face severe trauma and ongoing life-threatening adversity.

Ways Forward: Introducing “Forced Resilience”

A multidimensional, interdisciplinary developmental framework and the encouragement
to carry out longitudinal studies when focusing on trauma, ongoing toxic stress, life-
threatening adversity, resilience, and psychopathology is part of the answer for how to
move forward in resilience research. This, however, does not diminish the vulnerable
Achilles heel of resilience research. The introduction and historical account of resilience
research and how its many concepts and definitions have developed within the psy-sci­
ences referenced in this article show the abundance of definitions and concepts in re­
silience research. Our case study, however, calls for the introduction of yet another one;
the concept of “forced resilience.”

We argue that the concept is needed since, for instance, the expression “extreme adversi­
ty” is used in reference to numerous types of adversity (Masten, 2011). It seems neces­
sary to be able to communicate and distinguish clearly whether one studies children and
youth growing up in adversity with daily threats to survival or not. Thus, forced resilience
is a concept that can clearly flag a study population that has been exposed to life-threat­
ening adversity.

Forced resilience builds on an eclectic approach to understanding experiences of and re­

sponses to potentially traumatizing events (Bonanno & Diminich, 2013), acute or ongoing
trauma, and every kind of adversity that forces you into situations where your survival is
at stake. Forced resilience encourages comparisons and critical reflections on how stud­
ied responses resonate with remaining resilience and psychotraumatology literature. We
underline that forced resilience entails a definition of resilience not as a construct but re­
silience perceived as a response to life-threatening adversity. On this theoretically and
empirically informed premise, and with the realization that forced resilience entails situa­
tions, human interaction, and responses of great complexity and variation, “forced re­
silience” is defined as entailing responses to life-threatening adversity. Responses are de­
fined as impulsive, unconscious, and/or consciously strategic ways of coping with past
and/or current life-threatening adversity. In “forced resilience,” life-threatening adversity
is purposefully broadly defined and can entail being exposed to life-threatening actions or
milieus in any interpersonal dynamic system—whether a family, an institutional setting, a
community, society, or conflict situations. Conflict situations and contexts might trans­
gress borders between any of these dynamic systems—and potentially national borders
too, since conflicts and wars at times travel, transgress national borders, or are fought as
proxy wars. Forced resilience responses include single and/or plural responses to life-
threatening adversity, for instance, an impulsive response in a life-threatening fight-or-

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

flight or freeze situation (Porges, 2009; Shalinski, Schauer, & Elbert, 2015; Schauer & El­
bert, 2010), as well as adaptation processes over time to continuous life-threatening ad­
versity. With the acknowledgment of the interchangeable nature and quality for all human
beings of our sense of belonging and our social relationships, “forced resilience” means
that when facing life-threatening adversity, the forced resilient response is perceived as a
response which allows one to physically survive, socially belong, and to over time main­
tain a connection to what one’s community consider their shared reality, cultural cus­
toms, and morally appreciated constituted rules for coexistence.

As reviewed in this article, recent literature on resilience in war-affected contexts urges

fellow resilience and psychotraumatology researchers to more explicitly contextualize in
what circumstances trauma or resilience is assessed or explored (Barber, 2013; Harnisch
& Montgomery, 2017; Harnisch & Pfeiffer, 2018; Hobfoll et al., 2011; Kerig & Wainryb,
2013). The definition of “forced resilience” is intended to contribute to exactly such speci­
fications; based on the argument that when resilience research is carried out in contexts
where people continuously live at the brink of death—this should be made clear in such
research. In such coercive circumstances, the bar for what is considered positive adapta­
tion, prosocial behavior, or resilience should be defined and set in ways which resonate
with the circumstances allowed in the given context. Furthermore, conceptualizations of
resilience, and psychopathology too, must resonate with how the human beings who in­
habit the local context perceive adversity, culturally appropriate ways of dealing with ad­
versity, and local notions of individual and collective well-being and healing.

Therefore, the definition of forced resilience deliberately does not apply normative terms
like “positive adaptation” used by Masten (Wright et al., 2013). We wish the concept to be
closely associated with how Lazarus and Folkman (1984) stressed that coping is a neutral
response to adversity, as opposed to studies based on the medical model with its inherent
normative evaluation of what are positive/healthy or negative/pathological responses to
adversity, which do not focus on emic local conceptualizations of how to cope with adver­
sity, and what is perceived as resilience in a specific local context by the local population
(Miller & Rasmussen, 2010). With this position, the concept rests on the empirical experi­
ence that the appraisals and narratives about such responses are subject to change with
time—and that such interpretations will always be situated. As such, and like many other
definitions and concepts in resilience research (Masten, 2018), “forced resilience” is in­
spired by Bronfenbrenner’s social ecology theory of how human beings are organic sys­
tems engaged in ongoing dynamic exchanges with their surroundings.

“Forced resilience,” however, still entails a paradox: It places “force” in close connection
with a perception of resilience as a dynamic, organic, adaptive response, which can make
the mobility and the force inherent in “forced resilience” seem incompatible. This para­
dox underlines the interpretative discrepancy between normative and categorically based
cut-off points that distinguish between responses to adversity that are considered either
positive or negative, either pathological or promoting healing. With “forced resilience,”
we wish to circumvent the dichotomy of right and wrong that studies in social psychology
have also argued against (Zimbardo, 2007), and more generally to call for abandoning di­

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

chotomies. Instead, we promote a mindset of continuums inspired by Deleuze and Guat­

tari (2013). Hannah Arendt (1970, p. 68) also eloquently bridged some dichotomies and
made familiar to us what others alienated when writing about life and violence at the
brink of death: “But faced collectively and in action, death changes its countenance; now
nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity.”

With “forced resilience” we underline that in certain moments, and in lives affected by
life-threatening adversity, categories of right and wrong are negotiated up against what
will enable one, and at times others too, to survive or perish. As such, the concept func­
tions to pose critical questions to dominant views in both trauma and resilience theory
and studies regarding with what certainty we define “prosocial behavior” and “positive
adaption” on behalf of children, youth, and adults who face life-threatening adversity,
whether in everyday life in a dysfunctional family, a life-threatening single-event trauma,
a violent neighbourhood, or a region in war and chronic crisis (Vigh, 2008).

Forced resilience attempts to steer through the troubled waters in which most definitions
of resilience plunge in; and which we consider the most vulnerable Achilles heel of re­
silience research and studies drawing on the biomedical model, which speak in normative
and universal terms (Young, 1995). Resilience entails a normative judgment of what is
considered positive/healthy, negative/pathological, or normal/deviant responses and be­
haviors. With forced resilience we wish to promote that we as researchers step away from
judging, and rather listen and study hard to understand how children, youth, and adults
in contexts of life-threatening adversity survive, cope, and hopefully heal and move on.
Therefore, the definition of forced resilience underlines that whether one fits in and acts
normally, healthfully, or socially and culturally appropriate must rest on local and emic
evaluations and not (only) on our research position as mostly a non-member, carrying as­
sessment tools from a different cultural context than that of the community under study.
The emphasis on the emic premise for defining resilience, in other words, changes the
role of the researcher from one bringing assessment models to the studied context to a
mutual exchange of perceptions, knowledge, values, and potential assessment models for
what is considered resilience in the local context.

If concerned with a diagnostic or interventionist pursuit, surely, as Kidron and Lambek

emphasize, judgment and evaluation is not alone inescapable, it is the imperative of the
work. Due to the complex exercise of assessing resilience, however, when working with a
diagnostic pursuit and thus evaluating whether young men like Janus are “developing
well” or heading down the path of pathology, many scholars who leave a safe context for
studying war contexts, including ourselves, run the risk of being more convincing in con­
veying our preoccupations and privileges as a safer situated human being than in what
we can say about the human beings under study and whether or not their responses to
life-threatening adversity are resilient.

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

Conclusion
There is a great deal of documentation regarding the consequences of trauma and adver­
sity ( Galatzer-Levy et al., 2018; Galatzer-Levy & Bonanno, 2016; Klasen et al., 2013;
Young, 1995). Fortunately, the number of resilience studies which nuance notions of how
human beings respond to trauma and adversity is rapidly growing. Since resilience in its
early days emerged as a field of research in its own right, based on coincidental findings
in developmental psychopathology studies, what we know about and how we understand
human responses to adversity has expanded enormously. Responses to adversity and trau­
ma are heterogenous. Whether the style of coping with adversity is serving a human be­
ing and her community well requires a judgment (Wright et al., 2013) that must be seen
as a dynamic exchange with the circumstances that are present, and with local, cultural
values and notions of proper ways of living; to reference Lazarus and Folkman (1984), the
judgment must be local.

The situatedness, relativity, and local scope of the judgment inherent in resilience re­
search is both good news and bad news. Good, because the decades of resilience studies
since the Garmezian school in the 1970s up to the current overwhelming and diverse
plethora of resilience research show that human beings do bounce back in myriad ways;
trauma as well as resilience trajectories are heterogenous and are not mutually exclusive;
one can be traumatized and resilient. The situatedness, relativity, and local judgment in­
herent in resilience research is bad news too, however, because the judgment inescapably
must be relative, and because the scholars or professionals engaged in resilience work,
be it interventions and/or research, are not always explicating the situatedness of the ad­
versity the study population is exposed to. And likewise, neither is the definition and judg­
ment of what is resilient in a given context sufficiently situated or subject to meta-reflec­
tion. When relating the findings of our empirical study to the reviewed influential frame­
works for studying resilience, the analysis underlined the need to introduce a concept
resonating with the reality of growing up in life-threatening adversity for children and
youth around the world. Their opportunities for choosing between several responses, tra­
jectories, and opportunities while experiencing forced recruitment are severely limited
due to an everyday environment of poverty, thirst, hunger, torture, sexual violence, loss of
loved ones, combat, and killings—including experiencing intense kill-or-get killed mo­
ments (Harnisch, 2018; Wessells, 2006). This article therefore suggests forced resilience
as a helpful concept to engage in reconceptualizing and contextualizing what adversity,
trauma, as well as resilience can entail in the environment and specific circumstances of
armed forces and war and among human beings exposed to life-threatening adversity
more generally. Most studies and assessments of resilience do not qualitatively inquire
about local notions but still apply standardized assessment tools developed in the West.
This spurs theoretical, conceptual, and methodological challenges in the field of re­
silience studies. Recent approaches, though, are acknowledging the need to adapt assess­
ment tools to local notions of adversity, how to cope with adversity appropriately, and
emic notions of what resilience is in any given local context of study (Akello et al., 2010;
Betancourt, Meyers-Okhi, Charrow, & Tol, 2013A; Ungar & Liebenberg, 2013; Theron et

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Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

al., 2015; Vindevogel et al., 2015; Wessells, 2016). While forced resilience does not at­
tempt to and cannot circumvent the numerous methodological and theoretical challenges
inherent in resilience research, at least the concept can contribute to flag more clearly
when a study focuses on life-threatening adversity, which can entail war-related adversity
and coercive circumstances. The concept promotes more poignant and culturally sensi­
tive descriptions of what kind of adversity a given study population is experiencing, and
how coping strategies and resilience are perceived in a context where lives are lived in
life-threatening adversity—and in some contexts—heavily influenced by armed forces and
groups.

The resilience literature in this article was analyzed against the empirical backdrop of
how the Acholi ways of coping with war-related adversity and their notions of resilience
in the data resonated with the mentioned resilience studies and theoretical contributions.
Forced resilience was introduced as a concept, which hopefully can prove helpful to en­
sure conceptual and situational specificity and, hence, greater clarity in the field of re­
silience research. Finally, the concept is offered to promote the notion that diagnosing
psychopathology and assessing resilience has as its premise to evaluate ways of coping.
The article has underlined the need for critical reflections and caution concerning how
this evaluation is made—and with what consequences for psychotraumatology and re­
silience research and for the lives of the human beings in the studies and interventions
we carry out.

Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the Danida Fellowship Centre for the generous research grant
to explore responses to war-related adversity, resilience, and reintegration processes in
the Acholi region in Northern Uganda. Thank you to our colleagues at the Danish Insti­
tute Against Torture, at Aarhus University, at the Program on Forced Migration at the
Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and to our reviewers for contin­
uously inspiring feedback to this research and manuscript.

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 Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity

Helle Harnisch

Aarhus University, Department of Education

Edith Montgomery

Copenhagen University, Department of Public Health

Hans Henrik Knoop

Aarhus University, Department of Education

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