The concept of social resilience and its relevance to young people, who are potentially emotionally and financially stigmatised by the difficulties of finding good quality employment and stable career trajectories, is at the heart of this session. In the field of international comparisons of health and well-being, Hall and Lamont’s (2009) examination of what constitutes ‘Successful Societies’, led on to their analysis of the concept of social resilience (Hall and Lamont 2013). This they define as ‘the capacity of groups of people bound together in an organization, class, racial group, community, or nation to sustain and advance their well-being in the face of challenges to it’ (2013: 2). Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013) distinguish between Coping, Adaptive and Transformative capacities to craft sets of institutions that foster individual welfare and sustainable societal robustness towards future crises. They argue that the ways of building ‘social resilience, especially in the livelihoods of the poor and marginalized, is not only a technical, but a political issue.’

The session examines these propositions drawing on extensive evidence from three on-going European funded research projects on the recent consequences of youth unemployment in Europe: NEGOTIATE (www.negotiate-research.eu), STYLE (www.style-research.eu) and LIVEWHAT (www.livewhat.unige.ch). The papers span theoretical debates and frameworks for measuring resilience, empirical analysis of ethnic differences in youth employment and links with parental employment histories, the potential of European policy initiatives to build resilience, and the prospects of youth resistance and regression exploring the dark side of coping strategies with rising anti-democratic attitudes and disenchantment with politics.