Workshop Report: Resilience in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Natural Disasters

Abstract

On January 16-17, 2009, the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSCT), a joint program of Syracuse University's College of Law and Maxwell School, hosted an interdisciplinary workshop gathering scholars and practitioners with interest in the topic of resilience in conflict and disaster settings. INSCT Director William Banks, INSCT Fellow Nick Armstrong, Professor Pat Longstaff (Newhouse), and Professor Ines Mergel (Maxwell), spearheaded this effort as a vital first step in a larger effort to understand the underlying factors that impact a society's ability to recover from a major conflict or disaster. Attendees included experts and academics from the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), USAID's Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation (CMM), U.S. Army War College, West Point, Syracuse Center of Excellence, L.C. Smith College of Engineering, and several academic disciplines such as ecology, anthropology, public administration, and economics. The purpose of this workshop was to identify the commonalities in various resilient systems in order to generate theoretical development for future resilience research.