Resilience, Resistance, or Regression? How Citizens Cope with Hard Times

This paper differentiates three strategies to cope with (economic) hard times and social and political consequences. In the literature, resilience is used to describe capacities of bouncing back and sustaining well-being by groups or individuals (Hall & Lamont 2009). Increasingly, however, scholars especially with social movement background also consider resistance as a (coping) strategy facing economic crises and its political and social consequences (see e.g. the “participazione & conflitto” special issue “between resilience and resistance” 2015). This paper suggests adding a third dimension of crisis response, namely regression, to grasp rising anti-democratic attitudes and group focused enmity along with disenchantment with politics as a response to crises and especially crisis policies and their social impact. This seems to be a blank spot in the discussion so far and the paper thus aims at exploring the dark side of coping strategies. We saw the rise of new political movements and parties from the left in Greece and Spain – with the potential of a collective depression if these movements fail in the light of imposed austerity regimes – whereas in Germany and the UK right-wing populist parties (AfD and UKIP) seem to have profited, building on increased anti-immigrant and anti-democratic attitudes. Drawing on preliminary findings from nine European countries we find a wide variety of crisis experiences and of individual as well as collective reactions in all three categories especially among young people: resilience, resistance, and regression.

Based on  EUFP7 LIVEWHAT project – Citizens’ Resilience in Times of Crises