Between Synergy and Conflict: Balancing the Processes of Organizational and Individual Resilience in an Afghan Women’s Community

Abstract

This paper examines individual and organizational resilience processes among members of The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, (RAWA), an Afghan women's underground resistance organization located in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since 1977, RAWA has used humanitarian and political means to educate, serve, and motivate women and to advocate for peace, secular democracy, and human rights. The authors analyzed 110 qualitative interviews, collected in Pakistan and Afghanistan between December 2001 and July 2002. An iterative coding framework identified processes of resilience and domain specific stressors (risks) and resources (protective factors) at the individual and organizational level. Further analysis found that these process codes clustered by function into components of an operational model of individual and organizational resilience. While individual and organizational resilience are described by the same model, these two levels of resilience were found to operate in synergy as well as in conflict. Although this paper explores a unique setting, we argue that a better understanding of resilience processes in general will come from increased attention to context.

An Agenda to Advance Integrative Resilience Research and Practice: Key Themes From a Resilience Roundtable

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Counterspaces: A Unit of Analysis for Understanding the Role of Settings in Marginalized Individuals’ Adaptive Responses to Oppression

“…Coping, consistent with the basic premise of stress models such as the one proposed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984), refers to the strategies individuals employ to respond to a stressor in ways that ameliorate the adverse effects of that stressor (Brondolo et al 2009). However, currently, resilience is widely regarded as a dynamic process, and, within community psychology, there have been recent advances in our understanding of resilience as a dynamic process occurring at both the individual and setting levels (e.g., Brodsky et al 2011;Luthar et al 2000;Norris et al 2008). The major contribution of the coping literatures, to our understanding of adaptive responding, has been an articulation of everyday individual-level strategies used by marginalized individuals to ameliorate the distress associated with oppressive experiences.…”

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The Resilience Architecture Framework: Four organizational archetypes

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