COLLECTIVE RESILIENCE IS ACHIEVABLE
The term collective resilience “It refers to groups of traumatized people whose old communities have been destroyed and who are learning to survive in a new world, where community may be non-existent, new or emerging, or multiple”. It is the ability of a community as a whole to withstand or rebounded the ills befallen her by insurgence, stress, disaster or war. The ability to response when faced with challenges in irrational and maladapted ways. The ability to heal the trauma an individual faced or a community is a great achievement in healing and restoration processes.
Trauma is referred to as the wound of the heart and it can happen in death, rape, serious injury, or other forced sexual activity. Our heart is wounded when we hear about someone’s bad experiences likewise ours.
Collective resilience is connected to social capital. There are many interpretations of social capital. The main elements of social capital are social networks, norms, trust and resources embedded in a shared social structure. Putman (2000) highlights the elements of trust and cooperation and regards social capital as networks and norms that enable participants to cooperate effectively to pursue their common interests and shared objectives.
Collective resilience is played out as a two-ways process: building community so that more people may gain support from the community.
Recovery from trauma and resettlement is assisted through collective resilience. It is important to recognize the strengths and skills that people with a refugee experience bring to generating collective resilience. Links with the host society are also necessary to generate resources and long term resilience.
Some people said when trust is broken it is difficult to be regained. This is the tragedy that have befallen the northeastern region of Nigeria, people were faced with a lot of security challenges and decided to help themselves by taking defense of their lives and communities. Various communities have form different associations to help in developing their communities and building their resilience towards external forces penetrating their communities and how to bounce back when attackers stroked.
How to build collective resilience:
1. Create a safe and trustworthy environment: we don’t wake up to find ourselves in a peaceful environment we work for it through collective resilience by choosing our leaders that will play the role. Collective resilience can be guaranteed if we take personal risk to fight back our oppressors. We most question everything we see that is not working accordingly. E.g the people of Michika in Adamawa and Bama in Borno States.
2. Create a shared sense of purpose: shared sense of purpose is one of the fundamentals of effective collective resilience, that is members should know and they agree on, the above can be achieved in an environment that welcomes questions, challenges, and ideas. Only in this way can we have high level of ownership and commitment be achieved.
3. Foster collective identity: Theories about collective identity are particularly pertinent to refugees who find that ethnicity has become a defining factor in their life course. It actively encourages shared sense of identity and this makes them to realize that what affect a individual affect the society. Castells (1997) suggests the basis of collective identity is the human being’s need to build intimacy and trust. We form different collective identities as a way of coping with a network society. A network society is the result of a disjuncture between local and global forces and separation between the social, cultural and political spheres. As a result of collective identity individuals are willing to sacrifice their personal needs. Coherent and inclusive is a key to being effective and resilient.
4. Promote a 'shared' sense of belief: belief is a two-ways thing we can or we cannot. It is tied to the bound of togetherness. The probability of any community to excel is to belief in their capability as a family and belief in their diversity using it as a tool to fight the enemy. The community that has collective-belief should be influenced and managed because it can foster a climate of mutual trust, empathic response, and tolerance for a wide range and fluctuation of emotions over time.
5. Build skills of dialogue: the ability to engage in dialogue amongst any traumatized community for openness and honest discussion is a way forward for collective resilience. People of the same skills and knowledge can fight a goal. E.G The Northeast Intellectual Entrepreneurship Fellowship NEIEF FELLOWS is a combination of different fields and skills which have come to fight a common goal using the areas of specialization to achieve a particular goal, restoring the peace and security of northeast Nigeria.
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