This chapter helps to further develop the novel theoretical notion of collective psychosocial resilience in the face of danger, whereby emergent cooperation can happen not solely despite a terrorist incident, but also because of it. It examines how the public contribute prior to professional responders arriving, and how they might be involved actively at the scenes of emergencies, incidents, disasters, and disease outbreaks (EIDD). Greater understanding of the realities and their potential by professional first responders should enable emergency planners to develop practical strategies to optimise the interventions required by survivors.

Flooding can severely affect wellbeing through both primary stressors and secondary stressors. The impacts may be mitigated by community resilience; this may be used deliberately or unwittingly by people affected and the responsible authorities. Using data from England and Ireland, we address collective psychosocial resilience – that is, the way in which shared social identification allows groups to spontaneously emerge and mobilise solidarity and social support. First, we show that shared social identity can emerge during floods due to experiencing a common fate, and this leads to communities mobilising social support. Second, we show that emergent shared social identity can decline due to a lack of perceived common fate, the disappearance of collective identity, or inequalities experienced after the disaster. However, social identity can be sustained by communities providing social support, by persisting secondary stressors, or intentionally by holding commemorations. Additionally, shared social identity is associated with observed unity.

This chapter analyses different aspects of resilience, or the lack thereof, within the experiences of those affected by five decades of armed conflict in Colombia. Although resilience has long been understood in a person-centred way, this chapter argues that such personal aspects of resilience cannot be understood in isolation from broader socio-economic aspects such as work, social relations and communities’ wider developmental and infrastructural conditions. The chapter discusses whether and how transitional justice has addressed these issues in Colombia. Looking particularly at reparations, it demonstrates that transitional justice has predominantly taken a person-centric approach oriented towards monetary compensation, while disregarding the wider social, built and natural environment. It also explores how the needs of those affected by conflict can change over time and across conflict experiences and geographical spaces. This necessarily requires an ongoing analysis of locally-specific needs and conditions, in line with the core elements of adaptive peacebuilding. The chapter concludes with reflections on how transitional justice, including the restorative justice sentences which will be applied by Colombia’s most recent transitional justice mechanism – the Special Jurisdiction for Peace – could help to promote the resilience that conflict-affected communities need to move forward.