Building Resilience in Humanitarian Settings: From Individual Capacities to Socio-Ecological and Structural Approaches

BackgroundPopulations exposed to armed conflict, forced displacement, disaster and protracted political violence face sustained threats to mental health, alongside the disruption of families, communities, institutions and access to essential resources. These settings share a feature that distinguishes them from most contexts in which resilience is studied: the adversity has not ended. People are not recovering from a past disruption but adapting within a continuing one.That distinction has consequences the field has not fully absorbed. Resilience research has rightly moved beyond treating resilience as a stable individual trait, and socio-ecological perspectives now describe it as a process emerging through interaction between individuals and their relational, community, institutional and structural environments. Psychological capacities — emotion regulation, coping, compassion, meaning-making, social connectedness — remain genuinely important, and resilience- and compassion-based interventions have value for mental health promotion and the prevention of psychopathology. But where people remain exposed to violence, displacement, deprivation and the loss of social infrastructure, strengthening individual capacity addresses only the level at which intervention is easiest, not necessarily the level at which change is needed.This Research Topic proceeds from an explicit position: that resilience frameworks should not place the responsibility for adaptation on the people least able to alter the conditions producing their distress. Understanding how resilience can be supported in humanitarian settings therefore requires examining not only individual psychological resources, but the relationships, communities, institutions and structural conditions that determine whether adaptation is possible at all.GoalThe primary goal is to characterise resilience in humanitarian and conflict-affected settings as a multilevel process, and to establish what each level — individual, relational, community, institutional, structural — actually contributes when exposure is ongoing.A second goal is to examine interventions according to the level at which they act, including how individually focused approaches perform under continuing threat, what community, institutional and structural interventions achieve that individual training cannot, and how multilevel approaches can address several levels at once.A third is to establish the conditions under which resilience-oriented work can be implemented and sustained in humanitarian and low-resource settings, including the role of community participation, local and cultural knowledge, institutional response and structural determinants.ScopeWe welcome theoretical, empirical and implementation-oriented contributions. Relevant populations include individuals and communities exposed to armed conflict, forced displacement and humanitarian migration, disaster, protracted political violence and collective trauma. Poverty, discrimination, social exclusion and social injustice are firmly within scope as conditions that compound adversity in these settings.1. Conceptualising resilience under ongoing exposure Socio-ecological models and their application to unresolved adversity; how resilience differs conceptually when the stressor persists; resilience processes, mechanisms and trajectories over time; critical perspectives on the individualisation of resilience.2. Individual and relational capacities Emotion regulation, coping, compassion and self-compassion, meaning-making and social connectedness; family and relational resources; social support and connectedness as protective processes — and evidence on their limits under continuing threat.3. Community, cultural and institutional levels Community and collective resilience; cultural resources and culturally grounded practice; local knowledge and community-led responses; institutional responses and the role of social infrastructure.4. Structural determinants Structural and social determinants of resilience and mental health in humanitarian settings; how policy, resource distribution and protection systems shape the conditions for adaptation; interventions that act on conditions rather than on persons.5. Interventions and implementation Resilience-promoting and psychopathology-prevention interventions at any level, including individual, group, family, community, peer-support, digital, school- and workplace-based, organisational and public-health approaches; comparative evaluation across levels; multilevel and systems-oriented interventions; implementation, feasibility, acceptability, sustainability and scalability in low-resource settings; participatory and community-engaged approaches.We particularly welcome longitudinal, mixed-methods and multilevel designs, and research from and about under-represented regions.Outside the scope: resilience in general-population, workplace, educational and clinical contexts unconnected to humanitarian or conflict-affected settings, which several open collections already address.Overall perspectiveThis Research Topic seeks an integrative account of resilience that examines how psychological capacities and social, community, institutional and structural conditions interact — identifying not only how people can be supported in building psychological resources, but which changes in their environments are necessary for individuals, families and communities to adapt and thrive despite adversity. Topic editors: Lina Maria Gonzalez-Ballesteros, Sascha Hein Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86466/building-resilience-in-humanitarian-settings-from-individual-capacities-to-socio-ecological-and-structural-approaches