Tales of resilience: voices from detention and imprisonment in Russia.

Abstract

As the exposure to state violence could have long-term negative consequences on the survivors, we analyzed which optics and measures could be used regardless of the vulnerabilities of the individual, their social status and institutional context. We examine the ways in which law enforcement system challenges individuals and measures used to practice resilience.We use the concept of resilience within torturing environment to achieve our goal. Various actors of Russian law enforcement and penitentiary systems - detainees and pris-oners, their family members, human rights activists, state agents etc. - participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews, which we coded basing on grounded theory.Measures employed by survivors to exer-cise resilience involve regaining bodily control (both by exercise and self-harm), having pro-jections for future (by threats of legal prose-cution or publicity), exploiting bureaucracy to one's advantage, controlling information flow (by bluffing), controlling material evidence, employing allies and preserving the meaning of "normal self ".We believe that our findings can have prac-tical applications, e.g. for preventing some of the negative consequences of torture by train-ing vulnerable individuals to employ resilient strategies. Describing the way to interpret the power imbalances inherent to the torture en-vironment might also be helpful for appre-ciating even the smallest acts, including the choice not to act.