Description
Over the past decade, resilience has become a buzzword in international interventions. Literature has provided an ambiguous assessment of resilience and its gendered implications: some scholars have problematised international resilience-building interventions as a form of governmentality that reproduces existing power structures; others have approached resilience from the bottom-up perspective of communities, highlighting its potential for resistance.
In Armenia, resilience appeared amidst a poly-crisis marked by the covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, which ended with Azerbaijan’s military recapturing of the disputed territory in September 2023. In this context, Armenia’s southernmost province of Syunik became a borderland faced with a vulnerable security position. The 2020 war disrupted Syunik’s geography, economy and everyday livelihoods, with many fearing it would turn into a new hotspot of conflict.
This paper examines how different forms of resilience redefine relations of (in)security in Armenia’s Syunik province and beyond, and their gendered implications. Drawing on feminist interventions across security studies, political geography and IR, the paper delves into the ambiguities that emerge from the encounter between resilience-building interventions and local agency. I examine how ‘resilient subjects’ in Armenian borderlands come to be and for which ends, while also considering bottom-up practices that disrupt the logics of top-down interventions.
Through original fieldwork data, the paper shows how the building of resilience in Syunik constitutes both a discourse of coping with persistent uncertainty, as well as of hoping for a safer future (which may never arrive). It also demonstrates that resilience is invoked to displace international and national actors’ security failure – namely, the failure to prevent ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Lastly, by highlighting the disjuncture between official discourses and everyday practices of communities, the paper reflects on the possibility for bottom-up forms of ‘resilience-in-practice’ that challenge violent systems through care.
