- Convenors:
-
Caitriona Dowd
(University College Dublin)
Kelsey Gleason (University of Vermont)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Conflict, crisis and humanitarianism
Short Abstract
Inviting papers that i) map sources of social capital among groups; ii) identify how different agents generate, undermine and/or harness social capital; iii) trace pathways by which social capital shapes resilience; and iv) propose approaches for understanding social capital's impacts on resilience.
Description
Crisis responses at the intersection of the humanitarian-development-peace nexus increasingly aim to prioritise approaches that leverage resources and capacities within affected communities, and support long-term adaptability, mitigation and recovery beyond short-term coping alone. Against this backdrop, research has demonstrated the value of social capital for resilience at various levels and stages of the disaster cycle, from preparedness through recovery. However, understanding social capital’s role in fragile and conflict-affected contexts is challenging. Stressors and shocks in these contexts can be protracted, cyclical and severe. In addition, conflict-related divisions can entrench, transform or undermine social bonds and networks, while insular forms of social capital can reinforce distrust and undermine long-term resilience. As such, understanding of the precise ways social capital can practically and positively support resilience in contexts characterised by conflict and fragility remains limited. In response, this panel invites papers that explore the role(s) of social capital in resilience in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, including contributions that i) map sources of social capital within and across crisis-affected groups; ii) identify how different agents in conflict contexts generate, undermine and/or harness social capital among affected populations; iii) trace pathways through which social capital contributes to, disrupts or undermines (different aspects of) resilience; and iv) propose approaches for understanding, documenting and/or analysing social capital and its impacts on resilience.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This research explores how community-led, participatory localization strengthens social capital and resilience in conflict settings in Cité Soleil, Haiti. We show engaging communities throughout the research process builds trust and supports sustainable, locally owned peacebuilding.
Paper long abstract
Increasingly, leveraging a localized approach is recognized as a fundamental pillar for success in building social capital and promoting resilience in humanitarian disasters, particularly conflict-affected contexts. A localized approach to building social capital and resilience in conflict settings builds on local knowledge, networks, and resources for more sustainable and locally owned peacebuilding efforts. Yet often these localized efforts lack community engagement and participation. In this study on understanding the role of social capital in building resilience in Cité Soleil, Haiti, we build on principles of localization through a community-led, participatory approach. Through this participatory method, community members played a leading role in all stages of the research project, from research question development to implementation, fostering trust and relationships and building the foundations for effective conflict resolution through social capital and resilience. In this paper, we present the methodology used to successfully implement a locally-led and participatory research study, lessons learned, preliminary research findings, and opportunities for future work.
Paper short abstract
Internally Displaced Persons in Somalia and Somaliland contend with many challenges to building social capital, yet focused study suggests focusing on dual track place-based assistance, subsidized financial inclusion and progressive policies on land tenure can support bridging social capital.
Paper long abstract
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPS) in Somalia and Somaliland rely primarily on bonding social capital with immediate kin and their fellow displaced as well as their neighbors for resilience against a variety of stresses and shocks. Savings groups and other financial self-help groups promoted by NGOs can help build bridging social capital and provide significant benefits beyond financial resources extending to a wide array of mutual support among members. Yet inclusion in many of these is limited due to the entry capital required. Additionally while many have strong bonding capital with neighbors, assumptions and mistrust as well as the transactional nature of IDP relationships with host populations in displacement affected communities (DACs) keeps bridging capital low despite these populations sharing similar urban risks and stressors. Most importantly, a lack of land tenure security and evictions prevent IDPs from placing roots to build the bridging capital and trust in government that can facilitate resilience. Tailored solutions that address both IDPs and host populations in DACs can address these challenges and leverage strong neighborhood relationships to start building social capital while mirroring the growing humanitarian practice of area based programming. Subsidized assistance for entry into savings groups can increase inclusion and facilitate further bridging social capital. Finally, policies by local government that minimized evictions and allow a pathway to land tenure security can stabilize households, facilitate the two bridging capital mechanisms above and provide a foundation for further local investment, trust in local government and a start to building linking social capital.
Paper short abstract
Why do ostensibly similar NGO resilience-building interventions produce sustainable participatory structures in some post-conflict communities but generate weaker, less participatory committees that often collapse in others? We show how leadership style and social cohesion explain the variations.
Paper long abstract
Building resilience has become a central focus of interventions in (post-)conflict settings. Many NGO resilience-building programmes operate at the nexus of humanitarian relief, development, and security, and a core feature of these interventions is the creation of sustainable participatory structures through community-based committees. Yet ostensibly similar interventions produce divergent outcomes: in some communities, committees are inclusive and persist beyond NGO involvement, whereas in others they are exclusive and collapse soon after NGO exit. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork and a systematic comparison of four communities in Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, this article argues that the participation and sustainability of NGO resilience committees depend on the interaction between local leadership style and social cohesion, operating through the mechanisms of leadership brokerage and collective embeddedness. In high-capacity communities with consultative leaders and strong cohesion, committees endure by building on established consultative practices and shared norms that foster collective ownership. By contrast, in low-capacity communities with autocratic leaders and weak cohesion, committees face elite resistance and lack community support, making them less participatory and ultimately vulnerable to collapse. Intermediate cases produce mixed outcomes: cohesion can sustain committees under autocratic leaders albeit with limited inclusivity, while consultative leaders in fragmented communities can facilitate temporary participation that fades once NGOs withdraw. The study advances debates on resilience-building and community-driven development and offers important implications for designing more sustainable participatory interventions.
Paper short abstract
This paper draws on qualitative research undertaken in Amhara, Ethiopia, as part of the longitudinal Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) study to explore how social capital and community resilience is impacted by conflict and the implications for young people.
Paper long abstract
In Amhara region, Ethiopia, ongoing ethnic conflict is causing mass displacement, death, and community breakdown. Young people have been affected by school closures and economic impacts of the conflict, as well as significant trauma and loss. Evidence suggests that community resilience may protect young people from trauma, who encounter conflict at a point in the life course when social ties are particularly important for their identity, agency and socioemotional development. However, still under-researched as the different ways in which social capital may be sustained, built or eroded by conflict, the impact on community resilience, and the implications for young people.
This paper draws on qualitative research undertaken in Amhara, Ethiopia, as part of the longitudinal Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) study. 362 in-depth interviews, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were conducted between February and May 2025 in rural and urban areas with diverse adolescents, caregivers, community leaders, and service providers. Findings show that community cohesion is undermined by the breakdown of social capital, as people are less trusting and less able to help neighbors, community events are suspended, and people flee violence. Community and individual resilience are meanwhile built by religious faith and using cognitive coping mechanisms, but young people are also joining rebel forces for survival and in the hope of belonging somewhere. However, psychosocial distress among young people remains high due to a loss of optimism in the future, indicating the urgent need for holistic interventions which rebuild social capital as well as emotional resilience.
Paper short abstract
Based on fieldwork across Papua, Timor, and West Borneo, this paper examines how social capital is generated, fragmented, and mobilised in conflict-affected and marginal contexts, shaping resilience through kinship, volunteerism, and digital networks.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the role of social capital in shaping resilience in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork conducted between February and December 2025 in Timor, East Nusa Tenggara, the Papua Highlands and Lowlands, West Borneo (Singkawang), and Jakarta. The study is based on 166 interviews (94 female, 72 male), participatory video workshops, and extended participant observation among Indigenous Papuans, East Timorese ex-refugees, Chinese Indonesians, and multiethnic local officials and volunteers.
The analysis maps diverse sources of social capital, including kinship and clan relations, ethnic and religious networks, volunteer associations, and informal digital infrastructures. In conflict-affected Papua, protracted insecurity and displacement fragment social ties, yet clan-based support networks remain crucial for coping. Among East Timorese ex-refugees in West Timor, persistent outsider status undermines access to institutional social capital, producing long-term precarity. In Singkawang, Chinese Indonesians face economic vulnerability that contradicts dominant stereotypes, while multiethnic volunteer networks generate bridging social capital that facilitates access to social protection and disaster response.
The paper identifies how different agents generate, harness, or undermine social capital, including frontline social workers, unpaid volunteers, and state institutions. It traces pathways through which social capital contributes to resilience, while also demonstrating how exclusion, stigma, and moral judgement can weaken long-term adaptive capacity.
Paper short abstract
This scoping review aims to understand how existing literature has framed the impact of social capital on community resilience across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. It invites reflection on how to adapt social capital’s conceptual framework to achieve clearer measurable objectives.
Paper long abstract
The recent rapid expansion of literature on social capital and resilience has resulted in multi-disciplinary applications, obscure conceptual parameters, and a range of overlapping and divergent results. This scoping review aims to understand how existing literature has framed the impact of social capital on community resilience across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. The article systematically searched for English-language peer-reviewed academic journal articles from the Scopus database, returning 345 results which were narrowed to a final dataset containing 194 publications. From this dataset, the article used meta-data tracking and content analysis to determine keyword frequency, mapping the geographical distribution, contextual applications, types of crisis, forms of social capital, and programming objectives. Analysis of the forms of social capital reveals that bonding social capital has the most pronounced impact on community resilience. This is primarily at the level of first-response, whereas facilitating longer-term transformative resilience is associated more significantly with bridging and linking forms. However, the tendency to collapse these forms leads to challenges in discerning their unique impact on resilience. The study concludes that heterogeneity across contexts, forms and temporalities elicits programmatic variability for triple-nexus applications, inviting reflection on how to adapt social capital’s longstanding conceptual framework to achieve clearer measurable objectives.
Paper short abstract
Through a documentary in Himachal Pradesh, I trace how households live with landslides, flash floods and subsidence, and how uneven access to small-scale capital, sociopolitical networks, faith and public services shapes coping, mental wellbeing, recovery and transformation.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on a multi-sited documentary ethnography filmed in Himachal Pradesh (Indian Himalayan Region) following flash floods, landslides and land subsidence. Using the documentary After the Deluge as both data and analytic device, I examine how households experience climate-exacerbated extremes not only as “disaster”, but as an ongoing condition that reorganises livelihoods, care and mental wellbeing. The film braids five voices: a remote-sensing scientist interpreting geomorphological risk and changing rainfall; a young tourism entrepreneur whose restaurant and camping site were badly hit and whose family now lives in an officially unsafe house; a single mother and an elderly farmer living with cracked, tilting homes; an environmental activist linking hazards to hydropower and road building; and a mental health specialist contextualising distress, stigma and care gaps.
Across Parashar, Sainj Valley, Tirthan and Lower Badal, I analyse differential crisis responsiveness. Households vary in their ability to mobilise small-scale capital (repairs, rebuilding, restarting work), social capital (peer support, kinship and faith-based protection through local devta), and sociopolitical networks that shape access to relief, drainage works and safer land. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and work distinguishing resilience from transformation (Adger, 2003; Pelling, 2011), I show that the same networks that sustain coping can also reproduce exclusion when access to mitigation funds or relocation is filtered through local power and bureaucratic distance.
Methodologically, the paper advances audio-visual analysis for tracing how infrastructures and emotions co-produce pathways towards, or away from, transformative futures grounded in inclusion, dignity and psychosocial security.
Paper short abstract
How do small businesses build climate resilience when state support is limited? Drawing on mixed-methods evidence from Lagos, the paper shows how social and business networks generate resilience by providing information, financial buffering, and collective problem-solving in fragile urban economies.
Paper long abstract
Research and policy responses to climate change often privilege state-led interventions in supporting small businesses, despite their acute vulnerability to climate-related shocks. Yet in fragile urban economies, climate stressors are frequently protracted and cyclical, stretching formal state capacity and compelling businesses to rely on alternative sources of support, particularly in contexts of infrastructural deficits and regulatory uncertainty. This paper examines how small businesses build resilience to climate-related stressors in Lagos, Nigeria, by mapping the sources of social capital they mobilise and tracing the routes through which these networks shape adaptive capacity. Drawing on mixed-methods evidence from semi-structured interviews with key actors and surveys of 200 business owners, the study identifies business associations, peer networks, informal finance, and relational ties as central to preparedness, coping, and recovery across different stages of climate stress. The findings show that while business owners recognise climate risks and are willing to adapt, resilience is primarily generated through social networks that provide information, financial buffering, coordination, and collective problem-solving, rather than through state policy alone. By foregrounding how social capital is generated and mobilised in a context of economic fragility and recurring climate stress, the paper contributes to debates on resilience by demonstrating the conditions under which community-embedded networks can both support and constrain long-term adaptive capacity.