This chapter focuses on the village of Ahmići in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the Bosnian war, a massacre in the village resulted in the deaths of more than 100 Bosniak men, women and children. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in July 2019, the chapter argues that while many interviewees demonstrated resilience simply through everyday acts of getting on with and rebuilding their lives, Ahmići cannot be accurately described as a resilient community – the sum of its parts – because it has not dealt with what happened in 1993 as a community. A crucial reason for this is the existence of multiple systemic factors – including the politicisation of the Bosnian war, the absence of a cross-ethnic narrative and divided school systems – that have not allowed the community to come together as one and rebuild social connections. It demonstrates that transitional justice work – particularly the trials that took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – further contributed to entrenching inter-ethnic divides. The chapter accordingly calls for a social ecological reconceptualisation and reframing of transitional justice, operationally linking this to adaptive peacebuilding.

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.