There exists a vast body of scholarship, written from multiple disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives, exploring the complexities of resilience. It is striking, however, that resilience has received only limited attention in the context of communities and societies that have experienced conflict, violence and large-scale human rights abuses. It has similarly attracted little attention within the field of transitional justice. The book’s introduction sets out how and why this unique volume, which includes eight case studies, seeks to address these gaps. It proceeds to outline and discuss the three central strands that run through the book and weave the different chapters together, namely resilience (which the book approaches as a systemic and social ecological concept), transitional justice and de Coning’s adaptive peacebuilding. What this edited volume ultimately seeks to demonstrate is that thinking about resilience as a multi-systemic concept opens up a space for developing new ways of theorizing and operationalizing transitional justice that are more responsive to the wider social ecologies that link individuals and communities to their environments – and to the broader systems within which transitional justice work takes place. Responsiveness to these social ecologies and systems, in turn, is a crucial part of adaptive peacebuilding.

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.