Fostering community resilience for preventing violent extremism : perspectives from Central Asia

Abstract

Community resilience refers to the “capacity of a community to withstand, respond to and recover from a wide range of adverse events, either natural or caused by an individual or a group”. It is a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations and to learn from past disasters to strengthen future response and recovery efforts. Community resilience is a term often associated with disaster risk reductions, preparedness to mitigate environment disasters, emergency response and the ability to recover in a way that restores normal functioning in society. Although resilience is a term most often used for development in risky environments (such as a natural disasters), it is increasingly used for a broader set of adversity: economic downturn, a pandemic, crime, conflicts and terrorism. This paper will focus on how community resilience can help prevent terrorism.