ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the scene of the ‘terror–trauma–resilience’ nexus in the 21st century. Taking an already ample and valuable genealogical literature on resilience as a point of departure, it focuses attention more specifically on the ubiquity of resilience in relation to political violence and terrorism in what we might dub the ‘Civil Contingencies era’ (particularly since the early 2000s). While ‘resilience’ is frequently paired, implicitly and explicitly, with various antonyms across different areas of social policy, ‘trauma’ is frequently invoked – clinically and culturally – in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Whether ‘resilience’ and ‘trauma’ represent true binary opposites remains a moot point and is not the focus of the chapter. Rather, it is argued that contemporary discourses of resilience have attempted to foster some sort of collective identity at communal and national levels against the backdrop of collective trauma – both real and imagined. In addition to this declared stoicism, which as the chapter shows has also been written into critical incident recovery and counterterror preparedness legislation, a large and diverse corpus of work has studied the propensity of individuals who have been exposed to critical incidents, such as terror attacks, to recover and respond ‘resiliently’. Taking these heterogeneous approaches seriously, it is argued that psychology’s relative monopoly on empirical studies of such victimisation – coupled with an abundance of theoretical and polemic exchanges about resilience discourse, which fail to observe practical specificity – leave a noticeable lacuna for sociologically informed narrative research to fill.
